


Weapon of the Times - III

by starkraving



Series: Weapon of The Times [3]
Category: Halo, Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-01-14 05:24:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1254448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Remember that it was a time of war, that you were made for war, that you were made exceptionally well for war... and remember that they were too. The middle of your story is still a war story but in this chapter is not just about you. They called themselves Freelancers. They called you Maine.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Carolina

Your room has begun to retain the smell of your belongings.

Well, actually, your room smells like melted taffy because you left two boxes of Short Change by a space heater and it liquefied to tropically scented puddles of goo, but that’s still something. This is all something. You’ve never had a room to yourself before - or at least not a room that belonged to you - and it’s strange. You’re lying on your bed, waiting. You’ve been on-ship for about a week now, though most of that week has been in medical, engineering, and general briefings. Your helm and your chest harness are on the floor and the rest of your armor feels… insubstantial as you lie there.

Your new equipment, though modeled after Halsey’s work, is not a SPARTAN’s armor. Your helmet is 70% visor now, domed gold face shielding and highly-reactive neural interface that makes up the whole front and top of the helmet. Functionally, the OS is a better design than the MJOLNIR HUD, but the armor itself has no shield generators; the outer shell is titanium alloy but not pure; it has no force-amps, no reactive circuits, no bio-foam injectors; lock-down system is in place; it does have space-worthy pressure seals, mag-strip holsters, and titanium nanocomposite bodysuit with hydrostatic gel layer.

No word on its AI interface. You think, of all the things to gut the armor for, the AI interface is the least useful. Most SPARTANs never fight with an AI on board and the heinous expense of the necessary liquid crystal layer accounts for 90% of the MJOLINIR’s expense so, to you, the ‘cheap and ugly’ version of Doctor Halsey’s armor would be gutted for this. In your opinion.

Mostly you’d rather have shield generators. Like a real SPARTAN. 

You think of these things as you wait.

You have one foot locker with one rucksack and in that rucksack are your belongings:

One battered datapad – Everson’s, still loaded with his collection of digital comics. About eight boxes of Short Change. A blue plug-in holo-light, ostensibly for reading. Three sets of dog tags – collected and given back to you – on a thin chain with three bullets – dug out of your lower back – from Tantalus. A set of clothes in your size: four sets of black fatigues, two sets of blue, one tan. Socks, underwear, an electric shaver. Combat boots; half a dozen UNSC issue T-shirts; a sweatshirt (also UNSC). Six paper-back issues of a re-print Superman comic released on Reach. You got them by tracking down and calling Angela Kohl – the gunnery specialist from Circumstance – to ask about Seattle. She knew nothing of his whereabouts but she mailed you the set.

These are the things that are yours. Everything else is borrowed.

 “Agent Maine.”

A pleasant, slightly automated female voice says your new name through the PA system. The Freelancer Integrated Logistics and Security System, FILSS for short, is generally incapable of sounding any other way but pleasant, which, apparently, is a glitch in the ‘dumb’ AI’s colloquial subscripts. There’s a ticket in to maintenance because the monotonic cheerfulness is ‘creeping everyone out’.

“Agent Maine, report to the training room floor for combat assessment.”

Get your armor on.

Time to meet your team.

 

***

Your teammates don’t seem incredibly thrilled to meet you.

There are seven agents already waiting in the training room – a massive cylindrical room outfitted with the latest in war game tech, environment manipulation and hard-light generators. Or that’s what they say -- you have not had the occasion to train here yourself. High overhead, there is observation room behind wide viewing panels. Behind the glass you can see two figures. Recognize them, even at this distance -- the Director and the Counselor.

Even from here the weight of their observation is a physical force. Ignore it. Cross the training room floor.

The other Freelancers stop talking when you come in. They’re all gathered around the center of the floor. As you close the distance between yourself and them, they look at you and you think, their armor looks like MJOLNIR armor. But it’s not MJOLNIR armor and they are not SPARTANs. One of them, a woman in purple and green, leans toward another Freelancer, also in purple and green, and says:

“This is the motherfucker they bumped straight into Alpha Team?”

No one else says anything though as you square up to them.

The intercom comes online.

“Thank you for joining us, Agent Maine. With you here, all agents present now represent the top operatives of Project Freelancer not presently deployed on active missions. Agents Connecticut and Florida are currently deployed. You will meet with them upon their return. They, plus the agents here, comprise Project Freelancer’s Alpha Team. They exclusively cleared for Level Zero and, as per your joining their ranks, so are you, Agent Maine.”

The Director’s drawl is strange to you still, but you don’t mind it. It’s weirdly soothing, though you cannot tell if that’s because the Director is the clear source of objectives and order thus far or because you have a legitimate affiliation with his regionally specific Earther-accent. He is not really speaking to you, though. He is clearly saying all this for the benefit of the other Freelancers. You suppose they think he’s saying it for you.

“We will be conducting a series of hand-to-hand full contact matches now, agents.” Blink behind your visor, but otherwise do not react to this news. “I know there has been some… malcontent about the inclusion of Agent Maine on the roster. We will be setting those concerns to rest today.”

Do not react to that announcement either. Question the tactical motivations behind pitting you against the other Freelancers, but do not flinch. Watch the others. Note how the agent in light-brown armor and the agent in turquoise exchange a look and how a dark green and orange pair immediately elbow each other and become more attentive at the possibility of fight.

“Now let me be clear, agents. I am not permitting these match ups because I believe Agent Maine needs to prove himself to you. I am conducting this test because I want to be fully assured that Agent Maine will not kill any of you during the course of his working with you.” There is a stunned silence. Several agents visibly bristle. It’s clear, at least to you, that he’s baiting some of them. “I am confident that your training, augmentation, and equipment are more than enough to match Agent Maine’s particular skill set.” His voice lowers and the room’s barometric pressure drops. “Now, I need three volunteers.”

“Three on one?” says an agent in light-brown armor. “Really?”

“Yes, Agent York, really. And you’ve just volunteered.”

“Crap.”

“I volunteer,” says Orange.

“Me too,” says Green.

“Agents Montana, and Oregon. Thank you. Everyone else please clear the training room floor.”

Turquoise and the two Purple-Greens briefly circle Agent York who complains, “Man, I’m the fucking security specialist. Are you kidding me?”

“You’ll be fine,” says female Purple-Green, in a tone that says ‘you are gonna die and I will laugh’.

“Yeah,” says male Purple-Green, in a tone that means ‘what she said’. “Just don’t let him hit you. Like ever. Because I think his specialty is punching skulls in and you have this really punchable skull…”

“We knew this was coming,” says Turquoise. Her tone is stern. “After what happened to Nevada, the Director said he’d be bringing in more muscle.”

“Yeah, but I thought that meant, like, a couple more tough guys and bumping them up the leaderboard. Not one guy with all the muscles of three guys,” hisses York. “One guy the size of three guys and why am I volunteered?”

Turquoise pats York on the shoulder and says, softly, “Just keep to formation and keep ahead of him. He’s big. He’s won’t be fast and you’ve got Montana and Oregon. This is what they do.”

It’s good advice. She’s wrong, though. The others clear the floor, looking curiously at you as you pass. York joins his eager compatriots, Montana and Oregon. He looks back and forth between the other two. “What the fuck are you two so happy about?” he demands.

“Breaking in the new guy,” says Montana, who is male.

“Breaking the new guy,” says Oregon, who is female.

“Are you two brain-damaged? Because you’re about to be.”

“Hey,” says Montana. He’s looking at you.

Tilt your head at him.

He shrugs and takes up a boxer’s fighting stance. “Good luck.”

“Match begin,” says FILSS. “In three… two… one.”

Your fist slams into Montana’s head and knocks him thirty meters into the wall.

“FUCK!” says York.

“Monty!” says Oregon. Montana smashes into the wall and crumples to the floor with his visor smashed open and – do not stop, Agent Maine, do not be shocked by how hard you hit him without the MJOLNIR armor. Orders are order so you – pivot hard, catch Oregon’s decapitating back-kick in one hand. She’s fast though. She’s strong. She twists in your grip, whips the heel of her foot into the side of your head but you move.  You spin your whole body to the right in a mighty shot-put spin and hurl the other Freelancer. She smashes into the far wall so hard the metal buckles and FILSS says, “Medical personnel to the training floor immediately.”

 “Oh,” says York when neither get up again. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

York runs.

The match rapidly devolves into a game of ‘corner the security specialist’. York vocally dislikes this game -- “Nope, nope, nope!” he shouts, dive rolling away from you -- even ignores the Director’s command over the intercom of: “Agent York, the objective is to defeat Agent Maine, not play tag with him.”

“Really,” York mutters, backing away from you like a cornered animal, “I thought the objective was get two agents fucked up for no reason and then go for three.”

Hear him, tilt your head at him.

“Hey, big guy, how about you cut me some –? Yikes!” He ducks and pivots out of an attempted grab. “Okay, fine, don’t cut me some slack.” And when you growl, annoyed, he barks, “Really? _Really_?” Ducks another grab, deflects a swing. “What fucking pen did they find you in, asshole?”

Hatred is electric heat; feel it as static in your brain, the Freelancer’s words lancing something raw inside you and for the split second your temper gets the best of you, York rears back and kicks you, hard, right in the chest and the blow, powered by the strength mods of his armor, is enough to make every rib in your chest vibrate… but it’s not enough stop you grabbing the offending leg. (“Oh, shit,” says York.) Yank the Freelancer into the air like a rag doll, then slam him to the ground so hard the floor panels buckle.

York moans as you step over him, idly kicking his arm out of the way.

“Match concluded,” says FILSS. “Point awarded to Agent Maine.”

Agents North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming come next. Male and female purple-green turn out to be the Dakotas and the agent in white is Wyoming. Of the three, North and South are the real problem. They blitz you in sync.

Maine, admit that you are not really at your best right now. Your armor has no mods. You constantly over and under swing. Unlike Oregon and Montana, the Dakotas do not make the mistake of coming at you straight on. Frustration is a slow burn, building in your blood as they continue to blitz and fade, landing strikes and jumping back to avoid the sledgehammer swing of your counter attacks. South kicks you in the back of the right leg, knocks you down on one knee and North instantly smashes his elbow across your temple and snaps your head to the right and down.

“Shit,” says North.

South, not liking that, says, “What?”

“I don’t think that hurt him, I think we just –”

His next words are interrupted by your exploding from your crouched position into a flat out sprint, snapping across the space between you, leaping the last five meters and bringing your fists down with meteoric force directly where North was standing. All three leap clear just barely as the floor buckles again beneath the force of your missed strike. The Dakotas swear. Wyoming – sounding both annoyed and fed up – says, “Well, bollocks. York had the right idea.”

The Dakotas engage you.

Duck, pivot, block South’s throat shot facing one direction, grab North’s leg at the back of the knee, pivot, throw North to the ground, spin, slam your palm into South’s chest and shove her to the floor. Kick Wyoming as he jumps at you. Run at North and kick him in the flank as he struggled to stand, send him skidding across the training room floor and – get tackled from behind by Agent South. Snarling, she hooks her arm around your throat, locks her fist into her opposite elbow and tries to guillotine you with the full force of her armor mods behind it.

“Fuck you, you giant fucking –”

Grab South’s arms and hold them around your neck. Glare at her over your shoulder… then jump backwards and drop your full body weigh directly on top of her. Leave her groaning on the floor as you stand. Torque back around, ready to take down Wyoming and finish this fight before – oh. Blink. Process. Wyoming is still lying on the ground where you kicked him before.

He’s not hurt. He’s just lying there, hands folded on his stomach.

Wander over. When he doesn’t get up, come and stand directly over him.

“Good show, old chap, well done,” he says, lying there, very calm in the large swath of your shadow. Tilt your head at his accent just as FILSS cheerfully announces the match point to you. “Finally,” he says, sitting up and rubbing at the boot mark on his chest. He holds out a hand, obviously expecting you to help him up. Bemused, you take his hand and pull the other soldier effortlessly to his feet. Wyoming dusts himself off and slaps your shoulder armor in a congratulatory manner. “Welcome to the team. Frightfully good of you not to kick me again. There’s a good lad. Carry on.”

He leaves you there. Watch him go -- the only agent to walk off the training floor upright and not hobbling -- and decide you’re not so sure about Agent Wyoming, but you think you might like him the best so far. North and South Dakota lean on one another. You don’t have to see South’s face to feel her hate like heat off a smoking gun.. Ignore her. Pretend not to see.

And then there’s just the agent in the turquoise armor, squaring up to you and shaking out her hands.

“As our current squad leader," says the Director, "Agent Carolina will be fighting Agent Maine solo. FILSS, lock down the training room floor and clear for variables.”

Roll your knuckles into your palm, crack each joint. Then do your other hand. Wait. Watch her. Carolina bounces on the balls of her feet a little, circles back and forth at the edge of the center ring, pacing, pacing, as she waits for the room to lock down again and her anticipation is chemically catching. She wants to fight you, Maine. Her anticipation runs down your spine, makes it hard to stand still. You like how she moves, with a weight that belays her size – pent up intention humming through every sinewy line of her.

She cocks her head at you, jerks her chin. “You good to go?”

Her question surprises you a little. Nod your head.

“That’s two matches in a row, Agent Maine. You good?”

She talks to you like you’re already under her command. Nod again.

“Good.” She brings up her fists. “Let’s do this.”

 “Match begin,” beams FILSS. “Agent Maine versus Agent Carolina. In three… two… one… begin.”

This is the moment you remember most about Agent Carolina: that split second between her moving and your moving together to attack and you think, She moves like Kelly. Then she hits you. She doesn’t just hit you though, she supercharges something in her armor at the exact second she launches from her starting position and she hits you going about 25 mph. She puts 25mph of force behind the heel of her cataclysmic haymaker which slams into your throat and floors you instantly.

She hurts you. Actually. Your head snaps back against the floor, the air goes of you, freeze for the split second it takes the pain to suffuse your whole body. Lie there, stunned, your windpipe half shut, gasping into your helmet’s respirator.

Carolina does not fucking slow down because she floored you. She skids past, reverses hard and leaps up, bringing the heel of her boot down directly on the space where your skull was and, while she doesn’t dent the floor, she makes the whole room vibrate. You’re up and moving, fading back (the first time you’ve had to retreat) shaking off the pain and the psychological panic from being unable to breathe for that split second. The cartilage of your throat still aches. You can’t make a single sound now. Carolina rushes you.

She deflects your right-hand haymaker and her momentum carries her fist like a freight train into your collarbone and knocks you back a whole five meters skidding and she kick flips off your shoulder and lands only long enough to launch herself at you again. This soldier with the turquoise armor starts hammering body shots, ducks your grab, twists, jumps, nails you across the left temple. It’s a hit. A real hit. It fills your skull with motes of light and make your body wretch in on itself the way real deep set pain does to a person… but she hangs in the air for a split second too long.

Grab her wrist, yank her against your chest and lock the steel girder loop of your arms around her middle. Take a split of a split second to be startled momentarily by the narrowness of this killer’s solar plexus, then pick her up and body slam her into the fucking floor. You are ruining these fucking floors, Agent Maine.

Carolina screams – once, in surprise and pain.

Remember that sound.

She doesn’t stay down, though. She kicks you off her back to your feet, hooks her ankle around the back of your right leg and kicks, driving you down on one knee and putting your skull directly into the path of her explosive follow-up kick. The heel of her boot slams into the underside of your jaw, bashes the world loose in your skull, and knocks you sideways to the ground.

Carolina’s already on her feet and, again, she doesn’t stop because you’re on the ground. She comes at you and soccer-kicks your head with brutal accuracy, knocks your teeth into each other and throws you to the ground again, reeling. She’s floored you three times now in a minute. Shake it off and come at her. Fast. Feint right, go left, nail her in the arm as she tries to block your punch. Like trying to block a wrecking ball. She goes rocketing across the room, hits the ground, rolls, catches her feet again and charges forward again.

Her fist cracks across your temple, her elbow across your jaw again with enough force to make every bone in your skull grind. Allow her to punch you in the chest and grab the joint of her right arm, heave up and roll to the floor with her. Pin her arm to the floor beneath your knee, block the volley of face shots, grab her other wrist and pin it. Rear back to pummel Carolina unconscious at the precise moment she knees you in the backside, knocking you forward and – she grabs your hips, twists, and mount-breaks you back to the floor.

She tries immediately to kick you in a testicles. Block her foot with your knee and from the floor, kick her in the gut so hard it sends her skidding away from you. She shakes it off, squares up, shouts at you.

“C’mon!”

There is a tightly gathered audience in the observation deck far above.

You both charge. This time, you let her hit you, grab her arm, then grab her by the neck and whip her to the floor for the second time. Get kicked in the jaw again as retribution. Watch Carolina reverse somersault back to her feet, circling away from you. Two body slams, the gut-kick, and the wrecking-ball haymaker have clearly done her some damage. She’s not moving as fast. That said, your mouth is full of blood and your head aches profoundly and completely, muscles burning beneath your armor.

“Ready to surrender?” says Carolina.

You can hear the smirk in her voice, but you can also hear she’s slightly breathless.

Answer her taunt by attacking. She ducks, jukes, deflects, ducks, defects, deflects, she spins, tumbles, it’s hard to follow the liquid flow of her movement. She doesn’t waste a hit. She doesn’t hit you anywhere that’s armored – aims for the throat, the stomach, kicks you in the head, tries to break your arm, fails, gets suplexed to the floor where you almost succeed in elbow-dropping into her stomach. She rolls out of the way, pivots from the floor, spin-kicks her heel into your jaw again, knocking you to one knee where your vision blurs and the taste of blood distracts you.

Recover, shake it off, attack. Carolina engages you – launching a volley of head and gut strikes, deflects, deflects, counters, ducks, counters you again. She moves among your attacks as a blur. She over-exaggerates. Her moves are flashy but fast and she uses it to fake you out over and over. Her breathing is getting labored, sharp and athletic. You’re having trouble breathing with your throat messed up. She hits you, you snatch at her, she kicks, you grab at her leg and she twitches back from you just fast enough to avoid getting grabbed. Circle each other. Her firsts are up, your hand are open. You can see her realizing that you intend to take her to the ground at any opportunity.

“Weapon variables activated,” says FILSS suddenly. “Lock-down paint live-fire. In three…” Turrets unfold from the floor around the perimeter of the room. “Two.” Carolina is already diving behind the pillars. “One.”

The whole room becomes a blur of pink paint rounds. This is new. Hunker down behind one of the pillars, not quite sure what ‘lock-down paint’ means, but you seem to remember something about impact electrolyzing hard-foam and it not being very fun stuff to get hit with. Carolina is darting around behind the pillars. Coming for you, obviously. She dives behind one of the column to your left and you – you charge forward and straight-kick the column.

The whole thing explodes forward and the sound of it impacting Carolina’s armor tells you that worked precisely as planned. Carolina flies backward, tumbling somehow into a backward flip and landing, skidding in a crouch covered in dust… and that’s when a lock-down round hits you in the knee. It’s like being hit with a taser - every muscle from your calf to your upper thigh cramps up and the armor instantly goes immobile, the gel-layer beneath seizing up and immobilizing your leg. Hiss in pain and surprise, falling to one knee as the pain jars through you.

Carolina is crouched across from you, behind the safety of another pillar “Gotcha,” she says.

Surprise her by snarling and powering through your locked down leg, the paint chunk snapping off, but leaving your leg locked. She easily avoids you, pivots beneath the clumsy swing you throw at her, kicks you in the chest so you slam back into the pillar behind you. Then she’s all over you. The split-second slow-down from the lock-down paint in your armor is all she needs. She hammers a fist into your throat, your gut, grabs your head and slams your face into her knee before smashing a straight kick into your chest and dropping you on your hands and knees, gasping.

“Stay down,” hisses Carolina.

Immediately tackle her.

She grunts, goes down with her foot against your chest, kicks you back into that pillar, your head snapping back against the stone again and this time when she hits you it’s with the full fucking force afforded her by having time to ramp up her speed mod and jump kick you with momentum. She hits you so hard you go down completely blinded – vision mottled with lights, whole body numb, your head a pulsing locus of pain and confusion. Get up. You’re on your hands and knees, your head pressed into your forearm, completely paralyzed by the impact. Get up.

You can’t get up and somewhere far away FILSS says, “Match ended. Point to Agent Carolina.”

Someone kneels down in front of you, puts their hand on your shoulder.

“Agent Maine,” says Carolina clearly. “Hey, you need medical?”

Shake your head, and breathe – your breath is a rattling growl – and shrug her hand off. Wait for the dull throbbing and the darkness to go. Shake it off, slowly take a knee… then stand on your own power. Carolina tilts her head at you and waits until you nod at her, rubbing your throat a little while the training room floor resets itself.

“Can you talk?” she says. She leaves it up to interpretation what she means – in general or after she punched you in the throat so many times.

Cough once, then, “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

If she is surprised by the gravel of your voice, she does not show it. She thumbs the release at the jaw on her helmet, tugs it off with no preamble and then you’re looking at Carolina. The neck of her undersuit fits snugs to her throat all the way up over the base of her skull, the underarmor cupping the sharp line of her jaw as she shakes her bangs from her eyes. She’s a redhead – a startling vibrant example and when she looks at you the pale green of her stare carries the eerie intensity of possible  gene-augmentation. You wonder if she’s been augmented at all to withstand her speed mods. The question, like most things, is on the back of your tongue with no neat way to ask.

She tucks her helmet under her arm and looks up at you.

“Welcome to the team,” she says. “Sorry it’s not under less… exacting circumstances.” She glances toward the observation deck far above. “The Director wanted to make a point, I guess.”

The medical team have already cleared Montana and Oregon from the training room. There’s still blood on floor. Personnel are already moving to scrub it from the floor plating, mopping it with bleach. FILSS chimes that the training room is being closed for repairs and for all agents to please clear the floor.

 “You coming back with the rest of us?” This question is, perhaps, more hostile than Carolina was the entire time she sparred with you. “Or are they hiding you in the back room or wherever they’ve been keeping you up until now?” When you shrugs, she narrows her eyes a little. “They set up your locker in the main showers already. Been there for a week now. You know that?”

No. You didn’t. Shake your head.

“Well, it’s yours. So you should use it.” She studies you, eyes tracking across the mirrored dome of the non-standard EVA helmet. Her stare is acute, penetrating, taking in details in a way that makes you want to hold as still as possible. “Look." She re-adjusted her hair slightly, then puts her helmet back on. "I have mission briefing to take care of, but I want to talk to you when I’m off. Understood?”

Shrug, but nod your understanding. 

“You don’t talk much do you, Agent Maine?”

Open a shortwave HUD on the inter-team frequency. Transmit: no

She doesn’t laugh or respond to your strange way of communicating. “Alright. I’ll see you in a few hours. And watch it, alright?” Her tone is not exactly kind. “You put Montana and Oregon in the medical ward, Maine. It’s one hell of a first impression.”

You know exactly what kind of impression it was.

***

Oregon is in surgery. The doctors tell you she should be fine in a few weeks, though it’s unclear if she’ll be reassigned to the top roster again. They tell you Montana is not in surgery but they don’t know if he’ll be fine. He’s in the first recovery ward. He’s unconscious, they say, meaning you could go in if you wanted to.

You don’t go in.

It’s a quarter ‘til two when you notice you’re not alone in the hall anymore. There’s an agent in dark brown bomb tech armor standing at the end of the short corridor with her helmet under her arm. She’s small, pale, brunette, one side of her head shaved crew-cut short, the other half long enough to partially tuck behind her ear. The rest hangs to the pale line of her cheekbone. She’s watching you, a slight knit in her brow.

“You must be Agent Maine,” she says. When you shrug, she adds, “Figured. I’m Connecticut.” A small shrug, mirroring yours. “Connie.” She points behind you. “That one is Florida.”

When you look over your shoulder, sure enough, there is another agent. He’s fitted in dark blue armor, leaned up against the adjacent wall, arms folded. Like Connecticut, he is not very big. There’s a bandolier over his chest, hip to shoulder, and a second looped around his belt. His helmet is still on. Agent Maine, you have absolutely no idea how long he’s been standing there watching you and it sets your nerves slightly on edge. Ultimately, Florida doesn’t say anything. He just gives a kind of lazy two fingered salute, pushes off the wall, and leaves quietly as he came.

“Don’t worry about him.” Connecticut is smiling slightly. “He’s actually really friendly, but under the circumstances…” She leaves the sentence unfinished because the surgery light is still on in the hall, because the red glow is still on your armor, because it’s awkward that you hospitalized her teammates. “We just got back. Heard what happened.”

You don’t know what she’s expecting you to say. Say nothing.

She continues to study you neutrally.

“Well,” she says, “If you’re done, we should head back up to mess. Lina’s gonna want to have a sit down with everyone.” She puts her helmet back on. Fully armored, she still looks tiny. There are two combat blades and two magnums affixed to the mag-strips on her thighs. She falls into stride beside you, almost speed walking to keep pace. “You probably shouldn’t have given York your books, just for future reference. He kind of wrecks anything he borrows. Superman… that’s an Earther classic right?”

You stop.

Connie stops.

You stare.

Connie stares.

“Oh. You didn’t give him any of your things, did you?”

Five minutes later you have York pinned to a wall in the galley, hauled up over your head so his feet are way off the ground. His neck in your fist seems very tiny. York’s got his helmet off. Register his face – pale, Caucasian, flushed bright red, contorted with pain. Brunet. Everyone is shouting, but they seem far away through crackle of red static in your head.

“Maine! What are you doing?”

“Guys, stop! It’s okay just –!”

“Jolly good. That took less than a day. You owe me five quid.”

“Fucking Christ, why is this fucking psychopath even allowed –?!”

 “Just put York down and let’s talk this out before–”

_“Don’t. Touch. My. Stuff.”_

“MAINE! STAND DOWN! THAT IS AN ORDER!”

Carolina, still in full armor, has a hand on your arm and her fingers dig into the crook of your elbow, hard. Snarl and let go of York, who drops to the floor coughing and clutching his throat. Carolina strides forward and shoves you back another step, putting herself between their security specialist and you.

“You have five fucking seconds to explain yourself, Agent.”

“York broke into his room,” says Connie immediately. “Look. That’s not his.”

“What?” Carolina follows Connie’s pointing, spots the comic book lying on the floor. She glances back at you, then York, then bends down to pick it up. Her fingers on the stapled spine are careful, but the cover is bent, a tear down one of the pages. “York…” she says, in this very dangerous tone.

“Right,” snaps York, standing up, “defend the guy who hospitalized two agents.”

“I’m not defending him,” she says, her tone low. Like thunder in the fucking distance is low. And the air density in the room changes with the force of her displeasure. “Agent Maine fucking brutalized two of my squadmates today and I have yet to hear him say a word on the subject, but you know what doesn’t help me? You breaking into another squadmate’s room to do recon like that’s you’re fucking job.”

“Okay, how am I the bad guy?” York gestures toward you. “This guy almost kills two people in a goddamn training exercise and they bump him up to the middle of the roster and I’m supposed to be cool working with him? I snuck in there to get a little background. Big deal. He’s the one brawling.”

“York’s fuckin’ right,” says South. She’s standing with her counterpart across the room, arms folded. “Why the fuck should we have to work with a guy they brought in right to the top of the roster? He didn’t even run missions before now. They’re just bringing him straight in on Alpha Team? What the fuck has he done?”

“Thin the ranks,” says her brother, so quietly the others likely don’t hear him.

South ignores him. “No. Montana and Oregon are Freelancers. I don’t know what the fuck this guy is.”

“That’s not fair,” says Connecticut sharply. “The Director ordered him to do the match ups. If you want to blame someone –”

“Oh shut up, Connie.” South drags her name into a sing-song. “You’ve been on Alpha team for, what, a month? And that’s only because Florida recommended you. He’s the only reason you’re even up here at the Big Kids’ table, so why don’t you shut up and let the adults talk?”

“That’s a bit sterling,” says Wyoming. He’s sitting off to the side, reading something on a personal tablet. He hasn’t looked up the whole fight. “Coming from you, I mean. You’re only here because of your brother.”

“Suck. My. Cock. Wyoming.”

“I don’t doubt its existence, South, my girl.”

 “Shut. Up. All of you.” Silence falls when Carolina speaks. Carolina steps forward and hands you the battered issue, all tattered and colorful. When you don’t take it back, Connie steps forward and gently tucks it under her arm.

“I’ll just… hold onto that for a minute,” she says.

“Maine…” Carolina starts to say, her tone unfriendly. “York is a jackass. This is a scientifically proven fact.”

“Hey!”

She ignores him. “But you can’t barge in here and attack your teammates. That is not how it works here. The Director didn’t bring you onto this team to thin the fucking ranks. He brought you onto this team because we need soldiers who can do their job and your job on our roster is force specialist, Maine. You’re not here to fucking brawl in the fucking cantina like boot-fuck recruit throwing tantrums. Am I understood?”

Don’t say anything.

“I said: is that understood, Agent Maine?”

“Understood.”

“Good,” she says, then she looks at South. “And you, you are not paid to backtalk the Director’s personnel decisions or who he brings into the Project. In case you didn’t notice, the whole point of the match ups was to underline that Maine will not be babysat on our missions. So shut up. Keep your opinions to yourself and do your job. Clear?”

South mutters something vaguely like, “Right.”

North, who must be her brother, claps her on the shoulder. She elbows him.

“Connecticut, same to you. You don’t get to talk about the Director’s decisions that way. This isn’t a blame game.”

Connecticut shrugs. “No. But he sure did set us up to blame Maine, didn’t he?”

“Connie…”

She salutes Carolina. “Shutting up, boss.”

Then she rounds on York.

“You. I’ll deal with you later.” York looks visibly afraid at the notion. Carolina lets her judgment hang for a moment, then: “Maine.” She looks at you. “With me. Now.” And when you don’t immediately move she says, “ _Now_ ,” and the air molecules in the room seem to ionize.

“I’ll hold onto this,” says Connecticut, meaning the comic book. “Be here when you get out.”

“Thanks,” you say, and Wyoming finally looks up from his datapad.

As you leave, following Carolina out the door you hear North saying, “He collects comic books?”

 

***

 

“Take off the helmet.”

Carolina has led you to the Freelancer locker room. It’s bafflingly large and empty with just the two of you, but Carolina and her anger more than take up space. She seems different now, not hot off the end of a fight. The glacial cold of her anger is beneath her skin and in her eyes and it’s behind her teeth – sub-zero and liquid Nitrogen – when she repeats herself.

“I said take off your helmet, Agent Maine.”

Don’t move for a moment, your right hand at your side flexing – testing the feel of a fist--  and Carolina sees you do it. She’s not wearing her helmet, so you can see every muscle in the architecture of her pixie-pale face flicker with displeasure. She waits for you to do it: to take a swing or do as she says and for a moment it’s there again – the adrenaline tang of a fight and the two of you could rip this room apart if that’s where you take this. You could. Most of you wants to, wants to attack her, to burn off the anger beneath your skin but...

She’s your squad leader.

Reach up and thumb the pressure seal at the jaw of your helmet, pull it off over your head. Settle the helmet on your hip and wait for Carolina’s reaction. She studies your face quickly, her gaze tracking over the thin, dark slash of scarring across your nose, cheek to cheek, the strange composition of your eyes, the too-pale complexion of your face. If she has a remark on your apparent age, she doesn’t make it.

She says, “Are you a soldier or an attack dog, Agent Maine?”

You should be offended, but you’ve been with too many Marines for too long. “Both,” you say.

“You are really not very fucking good at this first impression thing are you, Maine?”

“No.”

“Okay, Maine.” Carolina rests her hand on her hip, just above her side arm. “Here’s the deal: I don’t expect you to be nice. Being nice isn’t why you’re here and I don’t want you to be nice. I want you to be a brutal son of a bitch because that’s what the Director brought you here for, clearly. So let’s have this understanding where you don’t need to be nice to anyone and I don’t need to pistol-whip you like a rabid pit bull for biting other Freelancers, because I am not running a goddamn kennel.” There is a beat, likely to allow you to be offended again, but you’re not. Again, you’ve worked with Marines too long and she just sounds reasonable and well-mannered to you. “Fall in line. Got it?”

Shrug. “Yeah.”

The right side of Carolina’s mouth twitches and you think, maybe, she’s trying not to like you. Or at the least she’s trying not to smile because you are the motherfucker that hospitalized two of her agents and she cannot, is not allowed, to like you. You wonder, Maine, if those two agents were not her favorites on the team. Either way, she says nothing else, just nods once, slowly and leaves you to yourself.

So that’s how your first day with the Freelancers goes.


	2. Connecticut

The rain comes down in sheets around you and you’re waiting.

The rain thunders against the back of your helmet, runs over the front of your visor, wicking away off the layer of hydrophobic finish. You wait. The rain comes down so hard the mud around your boots boils up and you wait while the water drips from the lines and angles of you, crouching there in your armor, deep within the tree line while you listen to Florida humming to himself through inter-team radio. It’s cripplingly hot and your suit’s temperature control doesn’t work very well – point of fact the only thing that works well in this suit is the textCOM neural-interface. They gutted it for literally everything else because, you suppose, they figured you don’t need much else.

This is how war works: you never spend money you don’t have to. Go to war with half the ammo you want, a third of the men you need, and half the rations you’d prefer. Understand that the SPARTAN-II Program was too goddamn expensive, that _you_ were too goddamn expensive. Lying on the ground on Circumstance, pinned under Kelly’s knee she said it precisely, the direction the SPARTANs were going: ‘ _cheap and ugly.’_ That’s what Project Freelancer is – forty-nine soldiers, one frigate, and a science team and _him._

The Director. Your new commander. He talks like a civilian. When he looks at you, think of Doctor Sharma… then don’t. The Freelancer Program is weird.

It’s the little things.

It’s also the big things, but the little things first: It’s South dying her hair purple and wearing it loose, CT’s half-shaved head, North’s illegally modded sniper rifle, even Carolina’s back-handed approach to dealing with her squad. It’s the lack of rank among the Freelancers. It’s how a para-military weapons and research project run by the UNSC -- an inter-planetary, inter-national, inter-galactic organization representing the Earth and all her colonies -- has operatives named after the fifty states of America; a country you had to look up on a datapad.

It’s this: there was an attempted bombing of a military frigate six months ago. Said frigate was docking for on-base repairs at a military outpost in the Sol System. Total on-base and ship personnel: 60,000. Said bombing was averted because of intell intercepted by Agent Connecticut – a then beta squad Freelancer – while on assignment eight months ago.

60,000 lives saved makes the top roster only with another top agent’s recommendation.

You wonder how many lives they credit you.

 “Maine?” It’s Florida’s voice in your ear. Send your query to his HUD via textCOM.

_y/n?_

“No. Sit tight. I’m all tidied up. I’m just going to be… delayed getting out.”

_u ok?_

“Oh, I’m swell. Thanks for asking, kiddo.” The thing about Florida – he’s serious. He’s actually pleased you asked. “Whoops. Gotta go. I’ll see you in a jiff.”

You don’t know what a ‘jiff’ means, but you assume that’s soon. Florida says ‘ _all tidied up’_ but what he means is ‘ _I’ve killed three Insurrectionist commanders and staged the scene so it looks like an inside job and I’m sneaking my way out, so ‘no’ don’t gun down the sentries, bust into the compound, and kill every living thing.’_

That’s Plan B. What you do is always plan B.

So far, Plan B hasn’t happened yet.

You’ve been one previous mission with Wyoming, who kept attempting to initial knock-knock jokes during the Pelican ride out. Of all the agents, you suppose he and Florida loathe you the least with the exception of Connecticut. Connecticut, who fixed the comic book York wrecked and left it by your door. The precise line of glue along the tear, the meticulously smoothed creases – you’re thinking about that when Florida materializes out of the jungle to your right.

“Hullo, hullo,” he says cheerily.

Manage not to punch him.

“I’ve radioed for extraction. Let’s get going, kiddo.”

“Not my name.”

“Don’t like nicknames, huh?” It’s dark but you can see in the dark. Florida glances back at you, rain dripping from his helmet, his head tilting. As far as you can tell, Florida is the only other Freelancer with no significant armor mods. Point of fact, he doesn’t even wear power armor. His attire is basic UNSC issue, though you suspect the bandolier carries contents that is anything but standard. He carries a battle rifle and a sidearm, but you’ve never seen him use either. “Sorry. Forget myself sometimes.”

Shrug, follow him. 

“There’s a bet,” he says after a few minutes. “The others are betting how old you are, Maine.” You are aware, Agent Maine, that the other Freelancers talk about you. Marines did the same, so this doesn’t interest you. When you don’t reply he elaborates. “I thought you should know. York has bet the highest. He think you’re thirty, Agent Maine. Is he close?”

Don’t say anything.

“Hmm, no, huh? How about South. She bet you’re twenty-five.” When you still don’t response he says, “North bets you’re twenty-four.” And, despite your silence, Florida says with confidence, “North’s closer? Interesting. I would not have guessed that, Agent Maine.”

Rather an answer, make an unfriendly sound in the back of your throat.

“Oop, never mind then. I’m sorry.”

You don’t think he is – sorry, that is. He hums to himself while the two of you move through the woods, the dark blue of his armor fading into the foliage through which he passes soundlessly and through which you pass not soundlessly. The Pelican ride back is quiet save for Florida who pulls a bag of Skittles from his back pocket, wipes the blood of the package, and makes a game of tossing the tiny candies in the air and catching them in his mouth.

Without his helmet on, Florida looks to be in his late thirties. He’s brown-skinned, his black hair long, braided tight and pinned at the back of his head so he can put his helmet on. His eyes are dark but refract the light back at you, animal green – evidence of a retinal-shine. You suspect, like you, he can see in the dark. He leaves you alone for about twenty minutes.

“The others don’t think you’ll be as good as Montana or Oregon,” says Florida.

Ignore him. Instead, ponder your own age. You have no guess how old you might look to others. Two years non-stop on the frontlines takes a decades out of a person, carves it out in keloid tissue and bone. Never mind you looked eighteen at fourteen. Never mind the two years dead. The lynch pin of your calculation is this: were you fourteen or sixteen when they sent you to Skopje?

“They’re misinformed,” says Florida, reminding you that he’s there and you’re still ignoring him. “Montana and Oregon were good soldiers but, I think the Director figured out what we need is unrepentant motherfuckers, if you’ll pardon the language. Men who aren’t quite men, if you get me. I think that’s why you’re here.”

Ignore him.

“They recycle call signs in this outfit, you know.” He waits until he has your attention. “Oh? You didn’t know that? Well, I can’t keep perfect track of the beta teams, but there have been about twelve Washingtons, eight Iowas, and four Rhode Islands now.” He eats a few Skittles. “You’re the first Maine we’ve had though. Suggests the Director’s been holding the spot for a while.” He chews the Skittles. “He does that. Holds certain state names in reserve. Don’t know why. He always does something… interesting with the names when he releases them though.”

His smile is bone white.

Ignore him.

 

***

 

 You’re in armor processing when Agent North Dakota breaks his silence. 

“You can take that armor off, you know.”

Look up from the weapons locker, where you’re stowing your spare gear from the mission. North is halfway undressed, sitting on the bench in front of an open armor storage locker – most of his suit already inside. It’s the first time outside of training that he’s spoken to you since the match up with Montana and Oregon. Agent Connecticut is standing at her locker in a sports bra, her body suit rolled down to her hips. She’s listening to the conversation while she presses an ice pack to her knuckles.

North waits to see if you’ll say anything else.

When you don’t, he stands up and finishes removing his armor components, stowing them before he starts unsealing the under-suit, a series of interlaced titanium-composite latches unraveling down the spine. Watch him start pulling the nanocomposite under-armoring down his bare shoulder like wet neoprene, tug it down to his waist, the faint lines of shrapnel scars speckling his back and chest. Without his suit collar up around his jawline, you can see the muscles in his neck shift when he clears his throat and says, louder:

“You can take that off, you know.”

“Technically,” says Connecticut, not looking up from her icing, “all Freelancers are encouraged to wear their armor as much as possible so our bodies get accustomed to the force amps and reflex circuits.” North gives her this _look_ , but she is still icing her fingers. “Oh, you wait, you _do_ know SOP? Then you’re telling Agent Maine stupid things for fun. My mistake.”

“But, _Connie_ , didn’t you hear?” She glances up at the nickname – tweaked into an insult, but North is looking at you. “He’s running like Florida – no armor testing, no command server uplink, no experimental tech of any kind. So, of all of us, he’s the one guy who can ditch the armor all day if he wants.”

Unfazed, Connecticut says, “What’s your problem, North?”

But, clearly, she knows what his problem is.

Like his sister, Agent North Dakota is incredibly pale, shockingly blond, and painfully pretty. His blue eyes look neon in the overhead. He’s the tallest of the Freelancers, about six foot six and athletically lean outside of his armor, which lends him a significant illusion of bulk. North doesn’t look at you as he strips down to his boxer-briefs and pulls on a T-shirt and fatigues. His bare feet on the metal floor stick a little. He still seems small to you – a human arrangement of bone and muscle.

“I got a note from Montana today,” he says. And he shrugs into his sweat shirt. “The docs are pretty sure he’s not gonna clear for missions again until next year, you know, maybe.” He yanks on a pair of boots, pulls a bag from his locker and closes it. He tugs his hood up over his short blond hair then turns to face you. He smiles and it’s a perfect smile. Agent North has this smile that so fine it could cut you. “I hope you get a bullet to the spine, Agent Maine.”

Connecticut slams her locker. “ _Jesus,_ North.”

He shrugs, steps back from you. “Welcome to the team,” he says, turns on his heel and walks out of the locker room.

Connecticut, standing at her locker, puts the ice down. “He’s not like that,” she says, looking at you. When you persist in saying nothing, she says, “I’m not excusing him. I’m just saying.” Then, after more silence, “North’s right about your armor though. You can take it off.”

How do you explain this? That you’ve spent months at a time in armor, sat in hot-boxes, in rainy worlds waiting for days in your armor, sleeping and eating in your armor, fully equipped at all times, two magnums and two rifles at the ready. For two years, you lived in your armor and it was the only thing that kept you breathing. It’s been two months on this ship and your disorientation comes easier while shelled in titanium.

“Look.” Connecticut leaves her locker to stand in front of you. You have to look down at a significant angle to meet her eyes. “Maine.” She heaves a breath, which disturbs her bangs. “No one is gonna just forgive you for Montana and Oregon, but you’re part of this team. It’s not fucking okay for a member of your squad to tell you to catch a fucking bullet.”

Don’t say anything. Just study her face, the small movements of her eyes, the little creases in her lips as she purses them. Connie has a pale heart-shaped face, a heart-shaped mouth, eyes dark almond and alert. She’s mixed race to the point that nothing stands out to you, but something in the smooth architecture of her cheeks seems familiar – like you’ve seen and forgotten many faces like hers. You like her hair, which is entirely non-reg. Allow that may be the primary reason you like it.

You say, “Thanks.” 

Then, with no preamble to yourself or her or anyone, disengage the locking mechanisms in your chest harness. Connie gets out of your way so you can access one of the empty armor storage units. De-armor in steps: release the locks in your chest armor one by one, remove the chest piece – so heavy it could crush a limb if dropped – then remove the leg armor, save gauntlets for last. It’s a long process, but you don’t think much of it. You old armor was almost impossible to get out of.

Shrug off the undersuit. Peripherally, be aware of Connecticut. The locker rooms are co-ed but she didn’t watch North while he got dressed. She _stares_ at you. Ignore her gaze, strip to your skivvies, then get dressed again.

You’re pulling your sweat shirt on by the time she says, “Those aren’t scars from a muscle-graft are they?” and you realize what she was looking at – not your nakedness but the thoroughness and inlaid brutality of your scarring. You shrug your sweatshirt on and ignore her question, pull your hood up. Feel Connecticut step up onto the bench behind you then, suddenly, her hand on your shoulder, warm through your sweatshirt and leaning on you like a sturdy wall.

You blink up at her.

“Sup?” she says, one hand on her hip, the other braced on your shoulder. Realize, belatedly, Connecticut’s touch on your shoulder is the first of any non-medical personnel to lay hands on you outside of your armor. Glance at her hand, then back at her. Decide you’re not sure, suddenly, that you like being touched. Alternatively, find yourself uncertain if you dislike Connecticut (who you don’t dislike particularly) enough to shrug her off.

“Has anyone,” she continues, somewhat ridiculously, “ever told _you_ , that you look like you give awesome piggyback rides?”

Give it to her: She’s surprised you. She seems only mildly disappointed when you leave her standing on the bench. She shouts after you, “I’m just saying!” And, when you’re some distance down the hall: “Thiiiink about it! Piggyback rides! Carolina will be so jealous!”

Catch yourself grinning.

 

***

 

Here is how the Freelancers work:

There’s 43% casualty rate and a 93% mission success rate.

No one uses their real names and its volunteer only. All Freelancers are vetted from a short-list of military personnel hand-picked for recruitment. Every recruit has the option to say ‘no’. Less than 2% actually do. Every Freelancer is assigned either an armor or weapon mod as part of their regular equipment load out. It is understood, the mods are experimental and could, as a possibility, explode catastrophically in the field. There are three known KIA’s resulting directly from equipment failure. Despite this, tech malfunction is typically one of the last things Freelancers worry will kill them.

Here’s how your third mission goes:

From 25,000 meters up the Pelican pilot has you stand at the bay door, a jetpack strapped to the spine of your armor, your boots mag clamped to the floor and the pilot opens the bay door. The explosive decompression rocks all three Freelancers forward slightly. To your left: Carolina. To your right: Agent York. Carolina shouts over the roar, “Just relax!” Not sure if she means you. She has access to inter-team bio-metrics so she may be aware that your heart-rate is up a bit on account of you and heights have not, historically, gotten along very well and you’re about to jump out the back of a fucking dropship.

That’s about the moment the light over the door goes green. Both Carolina and York cut power to the mag-tabs on the soles of their boots instantly and, like paper-craft kites, they are ripped from the back of the ship into the open air. You, Maine, cut power a whole second later than they do. Continue to hold that jumping out the backs of aircraft seems unnecessarily reckless to you, but then again… this is how the Freelancers work. The bald faced fucking insanity is, at least sometimes, tactical.

You’re at 10,000 meters

Carolina and York are a pair of tan and aqua colored bullets, rocketing toward the planet below, bodies straight, headfirst diving through the stratosphere.  Across your HUD, geo-mapping marks out the target in a bright yellow cursor, your teammates picked out in a green triangles as they bobble through the air, the planet hurdling up beneath them. York is breathing a bit hard through inter-team radio. Your squad leader’s bios are even.

 Carolina says, “Deploy jetpacks at 1000 meters.”

“Cutting it close,” says York, sounding flip, but you can see his heart rate spike as he hits a pocket of rough air. He grunts. “Sure we can’t do it sooner?”

“You can if you want to end up like Rhode Island.”

“Fuck.”

7000 meters

The steel hexagon of the Covenant compound is racing up. It’s an exploitation of technology. The Covvie auto-turrets on this base are not sensitive enough to pick out inbound targets smaller than a Hornet and cooler than a missile. That said, alien ground forces have eyes and can see just fine, which is why the three of you are doing this drop in the dead of night. Your HUD picks out targets in red. Carolina and York, M5s in hand, are already lining up their shots.

1000 meters

“Kill targets,” says Carolina.

And all three of you open fire. Any Covenant soldiers out in the open find themselves, all at once, missing sizable chunks of their skulls and limbs.

You throw your body flat against the air, flip your feet down and activate the pack, jets jarring the terminal velocity to a stomach-yanking stop. Carolina hits the ground inside the compound and she hits it running. York hits ground some 100 meters ahead of her. Flood lights light him up instantly, for a second blazing him brilliantly gold… and are just as instantly the lights are shot out by Carolina. Carolina who cannon-balls through a confused squad of Kig-Yar, firing with two pistols. She hits the ground behind them, leaving nothing but corpses behind. Then she powers forward, sprinting, activating her speed mod and then, in a flicker, she activates her camo unit and vanishes against the blacktop.

Carolina is not the only agent cleared for link-free equipment usage, but she’s the only one with _two_ experimental mods in her armor. She can run the speed and camo together for exactly twenty seconds before the strain will send her into cardiac arrest. So, usually, she sticks just one. She’s using two now because she’s got a HAVOK nuke on her back and it needs to go somewhere fast.

The infiltration team is on the move.

You have your own assignment.

You, Maine, are aiming for the south wall gunner roost. You hit the turret next dead center… and directly on top of the Jackal manning the main gunner. The meteoric weight, delivered through the bottom of your boots, slams the skinny alien down and pulps its ribcage beneath you in a series of cartilage snaps. Blood splatters the whole nest neon.

Take control of the turret. Turn it on the other turret nests and empty it into the screaming bodies, the night lighting up in bio-luminous chunks, painting up the battlement walls in blue until, at last, the gun clicks empty. Unclip a grenade from the mag-strip on your lower back and leave it behind as you jump from the turret to the battlement below. Hit the ground heavy, roll, and come up with your rifle against your shoulder.

Breathe.

Your HUD lights up the battlement in red target-markers.

Move. Rocket forward, directly at the group of Ultras, who open fire, but not before you redirect power to your legs and launch yourself into the air, unloading a full magazine into their upturned faces. The smarter ones duck behind their shields, but that does them no good when you land behind them and bowl another grenade behind you, putting the explosive under their feet. It blows their legs from their torsos in a neon gray spatter. Steaming chunks hit the ground around you.

Keep moving.

The narrow battlement is only about five meters in width, bottlenecking the four Elites coming at you down the barricade wall – two forwards with spears, two with plasma swords, a fifth at your back, staggering up from the shrapnel pile of corpses. Kill him first. Spin and open fire immediately on the survivor, bullets pegging the gator across the chest armor, ripping up his throat and he goes down thrashing. He’s dead by the time you hit the two spear wielders moving with the force of pick-up truck.

Breathe.

Deflect the first blade with the stock of your rifle, the spear-head cracking against the metal, skipping aside, then whip the gun butt-first into the Elite’s face. The second blade hits you in the ribs, scrapes titanium, glancing off – you yank a combat knife from your spine and ram it to the hilt through the roof of his jawless mouth directly into his brain. Leave it there. Uncap the first gator’s head with your rifle, then kick the still flailing corpse so hard it flies, skidding, down the wall to rest at the feet of his fellows.

Open fire to distract them. A standard M5 won’t do enough damage at this range, but the battery of bullets stops them while you charge forward into close combat range. Breathe. In. Out.

Clip your rifle to your back, grab a spear from the dead and rush forward, sprinting down the wall with the spear in your hands like a fucking baseball bat. Don’t bother trying to get past the shield just fucking swing the front heavy weapon and smash it across the first Elite’s shield knocking him staggering back. Lunge, kick the shield, you boot igniting gold ripples across the hard-light. It knocks him back again, staggering. Keep going. Don’t let him get his balance back, kick again, ditching the spear and pulling your pistol from your lower back. As he staggers this time, grab the edge of his shield as your boot hits it and yank yourself up over it like a wall, then unload half the mag point blank into his face. 

Blood again. Slaps your helmet, wicks away. Your weight lands you crouching on top of the dead gator, your boots on the shield, gun in hand. Blood hisses on the hard light, a jolt of static through your glove. Look up.

The last Elite visibly hesitates. Stand slowly. You have three shots left in the pistol. Pick up the dead gator’s plasma sword, the weapon smoking grayish steam and just slightly too large in your hand, but not by much. Step down off the corpse and cross the barricade wall – pistol in one hand, sword in the other. The Elite will not run. They do not run unless ordered to. There’s hardly a white spot left on your armor. You glow in the dark, Maine. Blood shining on you as you advance, dripping from the lines and angles.

 _clear –_ you send, two minutes later

Carolina and York join you shortly. It was your job to clear the south wall and Carolina makes no comment on the body count. The three of you leap down the compound wall and race away toward the waiting Freelancer Pelican, already landing, bay doors open like a mouth to receive you. Carolina is first in, you second, York last. He’s breathing the hardest and doubles over when he gets inside.

“Give me your biofoam,” Carolina says to you.

There’s blood on the dropship floor. York’s got a hole in him somewhere but the Pelican is already rocketing full burn toward the stratosphere and you do not get to see the compound go up in flames, you only hear the pilot whistle from up front and say, “Now that’s a fucking light show.”

“Ow,” says York somewhat pitiably from the floor. It occurs to you only a minute later he’s doing it for attention, not because he’s really so affected. Once Carolina has his helmet off he continues to bemoan his injuries while she, stoically, seals a bloody gash in his neck with foam. It’s, actually, a pretty sizable neck wound, which is why it took you a second to realize York is being dramatic, not serious. “I dunno Carolina. I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s a bright light.”

“Hmm.”

“Voices telling me things.”

“Sounds like a party.”

“They’re telling me something, Carolina.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“They’re saying it was terrible idea to have me land right at the security door. You’re the worst. That was awful. There were literally ten Elites waiting for me. Also, fuck you.”

Carolina has perfected her smirk in such a way that it is so audible you can envision its shape even behind the mask. “It was five Elites, and you were fine.” She pats him on the cheek. Very, very briefly her thumb runs across the line of his cheekbone. Then she kind of slaps him in an encouraging way. “Lie still and don’t bleed out, stupid.”

York grumbles.

She joins you, taking a seat beside you. “Good job, rookie.” She calls you ‘rookie’ but seems sincere. “You didn’t get anyone killed.” That is also sincere. “That’s your third mission, by the way. That means your people now.” Cock your head. Her tone is both serious and not serious. “Rookies aren’t real until they survive at least three missions. You’re not dead, you’re people. Good job.”

“Thanks.”

Blink when Carolina reaches over to wipe her hand across your chest armor, her palm pressing high up under your collarbone and she smears a trail of white through the grit and blood, brings her hand up. It’s all gone black now that it’s oxidized, is invisible on the material of her gloves. You can’t see her face, but you know she’s studying the mirrored dome of your helmet as though it will tell her something. This is familiar territory – your armor gored with blood, the stickiness in the creases of your gloves and on the grip of your rifle. Carolina seems to think so too.

“That’s _not_ the hardest thing you’ve done in your career is it?”

You just shrug.

Carolina taps a finger against her knee, not saying anything for a long moment, then, “He’s going to put you on frontline and support roles.” Blink. Realize belatedly she’s talking about the Director. “There won’t be a ramp up. It’ll be hard drop and combat rescue right out the gate. You should request better equipment load out. You won’t get it unless you request it and cavalry always has the highest turnover in this outfit so fight for your gear, Agent Maine. You’ll need it to operate effectively.”

You don’t think a shrug will cover this one. “Calvary?” you say.

“Yeah.” She reaches out, shoves you in the chest. “That’s you. Director gave you two of the hardest jobs on the team: line-breaking and saving Freelancers who fuck up. Freelancer fuck ups, you will find, are phenomenally grander in scale than standard military fuck ups. So salvaging a mission from a Freelancer fuck up takes some doing.”

York, from the floor, shouts, “Don’t be flattered. She only says that because it’s what she does and she want to sound impressive. Don’t feed her ego. It’s monsterous.”

“Shut up, York.”

“Never.”

***

 

York is, actually, true his word: He really does never shut up.

“Connecticut.” York’s voice comes barreling down the hall one night, the way York’s voice always does. “No offense, but who _cares_ if FILSS is the program running the ship, actually?”

Then Carolina swiftly following with, “Hush. Connie is talking.”

In your short history, Agent Maine, eavesdropping has literally been your best method of getting info, so you stop outside the cantina and listen. You can hear the sound of beer bottles being picked up and put down, the shifting of boots on the floor, the drum of Carolina’s fingers on the tabletop. You know it’s Carolina because that is a habit of hers, specifically.

Connecticut does not seem offended by York’s disinterest or, in fact, seem to have noticed it at all.

“I’m just saying,” she continues, “I heard it straight from our engineers: the ship’s AI is part of the mainframe, but he’s not actually the one running the ship on a day to day basis. They’ve got him sectioned off mostly into the command core. That doesn’t necessarily explain why we deal with FILSS and not him during missions, but it explains why we can’t access and speak to him on the ship.”

“Look, Connie. I’ll be honest. When I’m stationed on a frigate, my first impulse really isn’t chatting up the onboard Smart AI, but it does seem a little weird they would go through all the trouble of turning someone’s brain into an AI, station the bastard on our ship, then have it go off, and _not_ run the damn ship.” A clatter of glasses clinking together. York shifting his drink to the table top. “I mean, that means the Freelancer Integrated _Logistics_ and Security System is actually the one running the ship, while the Smart AI is really the one doing logistics?” A snort. “That’s smart.”

“It _is_ smart,” says Connecticut. “That’s what Carolina’s _saying_ , York. The Director does things differently, or did you think the non-reg nonsense on this ship was just the UNSC, you know, _relaxing_?”

“I didn’t think anything of it.” Imagine York leaning back in his seat. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Bullshit,” says Carolina, dryly. “You’ve noticed.”

“Okay, maybe, but I don’t _say_ I’ve noticed. That’ll jinx it. Connie, stop jinxing it.”

Connie, ignoring him, says, “Okay it’s like this: A Smart AI not distracted by running a ship can spend all it’s time thinking tactically. Our AI, whoever he is, runs all the intelligence assessments and data brokerage algorithms for the _Mother of Invention_. He’s the one who looks at the whole war, takes in all the data points, and tells the Director where to send us. What intell to act on. I mean, the Director is the one who ultimately makes the calls, but the Smart AI is the one who weeds it all out. Why have the dumb AI do the creative risk-assessments and the Smart AI handle, like, ship trajectories? It makes perfect sense to swap them out.”

“If it’s such a good idea why’s UNSC AI protocol the exact opposite then?

“The whole Freelancer Program is alternative combat and research, so if the Director pulls his AI to do some non-regulation creative thinking, no one is gonna get their panties in a wad.”

“Hey,” says York, suddenly, not following her thought to a conclusion, “why do you keep calling the AI a ‘he’?”

“Because he’s a ‘he’.”

“But we’ve never _talked_ to the fucking thing. No Freelancer has. How do you know?”

Imagine the slight cock of Connie’s right eyebrow. “I know.”

Imagine York squinting. “Are you _supposed_ to know?”

“You’re missing the point,” says Carolina, railing the conversation back to track. You can hear she has her mouth on the lip of her beer. “The Director _trusts_ him. You want to know why our intell is always good? It’s because the AI and the Director brainstorm on it together. Human-synthetic collaboration. Connie is right – what he’s doing is going to become the norm two generations from now.”

“If he trusts this AI so much, how come we’re not allowed to talk to him?”

“Yeah.” Connecticut this time. “That’s what _I_ want to know. I understand the function-swap. I don’t understand the logic behind never letting us talk to him. Unless…” And here, you can envision her shrug, one shouldered, her left brow cocking up slightly. “Unless, it’s some kind of one-way blind thing…”

“The Director has his reasons.” Carolina of course, steady and political in her response. “Maybe our AI is coming up on seven years… or maybe all the non-standard thinking runs their batteries down faster and he doesn’t want anyone getting attached.”

 “Man,” says York, “that’s kind of depressing. Seven year life-span then, boom, decommissioned. I have cats that lasted longer than that.”

Carolina quickly retorts, “You don’t have cats.”

“No. But if I did, they would last longer than an AI and cats don’t cost assloads of tax payer money.”

Connecticut doesn’t hop on the cat bandwagon. “Look,” she says, “seven years then getting decommissioned is kinder than letting them go rampant.” ‘Rampant’. You don’t know that word in context. “We just don’t have the technology to sustain an evolving AI matrix yet. You map an AI’s mind of a human brain but after a certain point they just _deteriorate_.”

“That’s nice word for ‘go completely fucking insane’.”

“What? And _rampancy_ sounds like such a nice word?”

“Personally,” cuts in Carolina, “if the Director doesn’t want us looking into the ship’s AI, then we shouldn’t be.” You don’t have to be in the room to guess she’s looking at Connecticut. There is a warning in her tone. “It’s not a valuable use of our time.” 

“Okay. This _is_ depressing,” announces York. “Fuck it. Can we talk about how Four-Seven-Niner literally tried to bribe me today to get dick pics in the Freelancer showers?”

Groans. “She’s still doing that?” says Connie. Then, to your surprise: “It’s Maine isn’t it?”

“Your fault.” Carolina laughs a little. “You shouldn’t have let the new guy walk around without his helmet. She saw him in the mess hall and now she’s out for blood.”

York snorts. “It’s not blood she’s after, Carolina.”

“The first Freelancer to take _any_ pictures of _anyone’s_ dick gets lock-down training with me. Don’t you dare.”

“Why are you looking at _me_? I am not a dick-pic kind of guy.”

“My phone history suggests otherwise,” says Carolina.

Connecticut spits beer so hard she starts coughing and slapping the table. You excuse yourself to the sound of York sputtering and the inaudible but still utterly detectible curve of Carolina’s smirk. Think of Ellis – how he smiled at you when you asked him his name and how, before any human had done it, he called you by a name that you recognized as yours. Imagine that the ship’s AI is something like Ellis, slightly sardonic, saying, somewhere, “ _Ah yes, the undead SPARTAN. Welcome aboard.”_

 

***

 

Here’s how your first full-team mission goes:

They deploy the primary assault team to the frontlines on Tribute. It’s been two years since you last saw Tribute and in two years since the planet is similarly fucked. The planet, they tell you, is on the verge of falling and all combat capable UNSC vessels within a single jump have been pulled into the fighting. Your mission targets are Covenant weapon depots like the one you and Seattle took out on Circumstance.

The mission: Obliterate the Covvie supply chains at the source and do it in less than seventy-two hours. You’re assigned back to back drop deploys with Carolina and the Twins to this end. Do it or die. Do it or the whole eastern flank buckles in under Covvie armored units and humanity loses eight cities. Do it or see the planet glassed.

Your pilot – call sign: Four-Seven-Niner. Short, acerbic, female, prone to eyerolling, ostensibly the best in the business – meets the team in the _MoI_ hanger bay. She gets everyone onboard the Pelican where she briefs the team on transport safety. She says, “If the _fucking_ safety harness goes over your _fucking_ face, then you are doing it wrong and subsequently too stupid to be part of this program. This has been a _fucking_ memo.” She points at you. “And you. Fucktruck. You hesitate at the door. Don’t fucking hesitate. When I blow the door this time, you fucking jump. Got me?”

It’s not exactly the kind of briefing you’re used to. Nod anyway.

“Goodie.” She claps her hands. “We’re all sorted then. Let’s go fuck up some covvies. Carolina. You wanna get up in the co-pilot seat and spot me until entry? _Fatass_ has been feeling a bit sluggish and I could use a spotter.”

 _Fatass_ is the Pelican. She loves _Fatass_ more than most people. That doesn’t stop her from screaming “Damn you, _Fatass_!” whenever the ship doesn’t do something precisely to her exacting standards.

You’re two hours out from target. Carolina listens to Four-Seven complain about new docking procedures. North and South argue the whole way, meaning South bitches at North says things like “Right, right.” “Yeah.” Uh-huh.” and “You gonna set your goddamn trackers this time?” For obvious reasons, neither of them are talking to you. Take the time to sleep, Maine, for intervals of fifteen minutes at a time. Every time you wake, the clock to action has clicked down fifteen minutes more. Every time you wake, your heart quickens, then slows. You are ready for this. Ten minutes out, Carolina joins the rest of the team in the back of the Pelican. She puts her hand on your shoulder as she passes.

 “Heads up, ladies and other Freelancers!” The ship begins to rattle as they hit outer atmo. Four-Seven is so loud, she’s easily audible. “Two minutes to LZ and we’re coming in hot! Anti-aircraft fire is for sure so one of you better be about taking that shit out if you want a ride back to the _Mother_! Gator plasma shells are not a fucking joke!”

“We’ll handle it,” says Carolina. “Dakotas! Maine! We’re up.”

Breathe.

Four-Seven-Niner calls you ‘fucktruck’ again, but affectionately, you think. South says, “Are you fucking ready for this?” and North says nothing. Four-Seven’s ship punches through inner atmo and the skies light up outside with anti-aircraft fire. The explosions knock _Fatass_ around, jarring her violently, jarring all of you, but never touching the ship. South knocks into your side. Grab her elbow to steady her and she bashes a fist against your chest in thanks. North sees her do it. The ship rattles violently, screaming through the stratosphere.

Four-Seven flies like nothing you’ve ever seen.

“C’mon, c’mon baby,” she says as the plasma rounds strafe the world inches from the metal skin of her bird. “C’mon, let’s go. Can’t touch us. C’mooon.”

Carolina braces. The Twins tense. Breathe, Agent Maine, and remind yourself – _You are already dead_. That’s when the Pelican slams to a full-thruster burn mid-air stop less than twenty-five feet off the ground. That’s when you know, _truly_ know, just how good this pilot is.

Four-Seven blows open the back door and you, Carolina, North, and South dive bomb from the back of her ship directly into the ugly orange glow of the tracer rounds that light the dusk, directly into the thick of Covenant forces. Leap out into the open air and freefall into the battlefield. Air roars past you. The weight of you tearing toward the earth. Breathe. Hit the ground in a crouch, stand and blow the head of the first Elite that charges you. Feel Carolina land behind you, her hand on your shoulder as she hurdles you like a low wall and puts three grenades into a line of Grunts.

“Maine, you move with me!”

You do. She makes it easy.

North hits the ground in a roll, comes up in a crouch and snipes three Zealots, one per bullet and says, “South, cover my six and lay down suppressing.” The report of her battle rifle almost covers him saying, “Set your fucking trackers, South.” And her saying, “Bite me, asshole.” But you aren’t paying them much mind because fighting Covenant forces without MJOLNIR armor feels wrong. Every ounce of armor you don’t have weighs on you. You’re hyper aware of your unshielded body beneath the armor.

You should be more afraid. 

But you’re not. Because Carolina is with you and Carolina, when she moves, she moves like a SPARTAN.

She hits them first and with sharp-shots to the face so they don’t see her until her boots hit them at 30mph. She smashes the commander’s face in, kick flips off and goes spinning back through the air, the force of her hit propelling her some ten feet into the air and dropping her just in time for you to pass her at 24mph then hurl your fist into the Ultra’s jaw. Your hit pops his skull from the top of his spine and he drops instantly. Carolina leads the way into the compound, puts seven bullets in seven Jackals, sprays blue wall to wall.

She leads, you follow. Anyone she bypasses you kill. She unloads her magnum as you two rush down the entry corridor into the compound, spends one gun, shucks the mag, reloads against her hip, keeps shooting. She clips a Grunt, misses its head. Kick it into a wall so hard its skull busts open. She misses two Jackals. Shoot one, grab the other and break its neck. Keep running. Keep up with her. Two shielded, eight-foot, 300 pound Brutes charge around the corner.

MJOLNIR armor would make this part a lot easier.

Body-check the first Brute into a wall. Your shoulder jags in its socket, every line of bone and muscle jolting with the impact. A grunt and a hand the size of your whole head seizes your right arm and torques you around. The blow that would have sent the same beast skidding two years ago, just stops him, and he grabs you by the throat, rears up and smashes you against the wall. Warning lights erupt in your HUD. He rips the rifle from your hand then slams you skull against the wall a second time. A third time. Again and _again_.

Feel human, Maine. Actually feel it.

Carolina immediately opens fire with her own combat rifle. The second Brute is blocking her, his personal shield eating the bullets in kinetic flares of gold. The Brute is laughing as it chokes you, the bones of your spine grating. It grabs your knee in its fist like a hand hold, arresting your attempt to kick it in the gut. Warning lights flare across your HUD. Carolina is shouting your name, she’s screaming through COM and over the boom of her battle rifle and you…

Pull you magnum from the base of your spine, jam the muzzle against his nose and pull the trigger. The beast’s face craters in, brain matter and bone blowing out the back of its skull and you drop to the floor, grab your rifle and unload the full magazine into the other Brute’s spine. He drops, smoking, to the floor and Carolina is standing on the other side, rifle likewise smoking. She looks at you, once, from head to foot, then puts a finger to the side of her helmet.

 “North,” says Carolina, opening inter-team radio. “We’re in. Setting the charges now. Status?”

“We’re good.”

“FUCKING SHITTING CHRIST THERE’S A LOT OF THEM.” (South in the background.)

“We’re _mostly_ good. Hurry up.” 

Carolina gets off the radio and you’re already setting the charges one room over, locking the mag-striped nitro-shells into the base of the power core. Carolina covers the doors until you’re done. Says, “Well, yippee ki-yay,” beneath her breathe and the both of you run once the charges are set. Fifteen minutes later, the distant mushroom cloud from the back of the Pelican fails to impress Four-Seven-Niner who says, “Stop congratulating yourselves, motherfuckers, the Director wants us oscar mike to new vectors ASAP. Recon’s called in another depot eight miles out that needs your special brand of violence. Team two is already at another drop point.”

“Who the fuck took my Skittles?” demands South.

“I got your damn Skittles,” says North.

“Good. It’s bad luck. Don’t fuck with my Skittles.”

Carolina leans over, shouts to you over the roar of the Pelican. “She has this thing about candy on the ship for luck.” She whacks a companionable fist into your chest. “Don’t ask.”

“Hey, Maine!” North has to bellow because mortars and plasma ordinance are detonating outside. “I take it back!”

“Take what back?” South demands.

You know what he means. Just shrug, once, and North gives you a loose two-finger salute. 

“ETA is twenty minutes, people.” Four-Seven kicks the Pelican up above the clouds. “Load up. We’ll be doing this all night.” She looks back over her shoulder, seems to be speaking to Carolina when she says, “Get results, right?”

Carolina laughs. 

“You’re a motherfucker,” says South suddenly. It takes a minute before you realize she’s talking to you. “Yeah, you. What the fuck do you think we’re doing, numb-nuts?” She gestures widely. “Four fucking Freelancers. _Four_. We are literally the four motherfuckers stopping this whole fucking Covvie assault. The fucking four of us cleaning up UNSC fuck ups. Swear to Christ – this is why the Covvies think Darwinism’s gonna get us. Because they all stand around with their dicks in hand while the goddamn gators roll in.”

“South, stop talking about dicks, please,” says North, lamenting over his sniper rifle.

“Penis,” she says loudly.

“DIIIIICKS!” shouts Four-Seven-Niner from the front of the plane.

“Oh god,” says North.

“We’re some haaard motherfuckers,” says South.

“Oh, _god_ ,” says North.

Carolina has her hand on your shoulder, where your neck slopes into your collarbone, between your throat and the armor. Feel her grip, fingers dig into the muscle a little. You can’t see her face. You don’t need to. It’s in the pressure on your shoulder that she’s glad she didn’t have to watch you die in that hallway. She lets go of you, slaps the back of your helmet forward. Grin into the floor, Agent Maine.

  
***

 

“You know what it is?” says South forty-eight hours, three evacs, one debriefing, and eight showers later. “It’s that the Director finally found someone with balls big enough to match Carolina’s.”

Carolina ignores this assertion about the size of her theoretical balls and takes a bite of her sandwich. She’s reading something on a datapad and working her way through a stack of grill cheese and therefore won’t be distracted from the task by whatever South is saying for the next twenty minutes at least. York, however, looks up from the stove where he’s flipping a pancake.

Freelancers assuming control of the mess hall’s axillary kitchen post-mission is regular enough that several cabinets have been set aside just for their stuff. North is napping, stretched out on one of the counter tops, his hands knitted over his stomach, impossibly unconscious through the racket. South is laying down with him kind of playing boredly with his hair. York has flour on his nose.

“South, what the fuck are you even saying?” He scrapes the edge of the spatula under the rim of the pancake, checks the underside. “I swear, the layers to your dipshittery just get deeper and more mysterious…”

“Fuck you, pencil-dick. I mean Agent Maine.”

Pointedly do not look up from your chess game with Connecticut. She’s fingering the top of her bishop with intent to take your knight and you’re pretending this doesn’t concern you. She plays chess like most people pay poker, which is ridiculous because you cannot bluff your way through or out of an Evan’s Gambit. She wrinkles her nose at you, like that will affect your stoicism.

“I know who you mean,” says York, “I’m just saying that – colorful as your metaphors are, Agent South – you’ll have to elaborate on the subject of Carolina’s balls.”

“Do not,” says Carolina, pointing her beer at them, “elaborate on anyone’s balls, Agent South.” She’s still giving her food 99.9% of her attention. She lets the beer speak on her behalf a moment before adding, “That’s an order.”

“I’m just sayin’ that the Director must have gone digging in every personnel file out there looking for a BK bastard like Maine to keep up with Little Miss Rocketbutt.”

“Please call her ‘Rocketbutt’ again.”

“BK?” says Wyoming boredly. He’s playing cards with Florida near the pantry.

“Baby killer,” says Florida with zero hesitation. “You want a ginger ale?”

“Oh, why yes, thank you.”

You think about rebuking the ‘baby-killer’ thing. You don’t, however, because Florida would like that reaction from you and, more immediately, Connecticut is cross-eyed and sticking her tongue out at you and you’re very determined on your stoicism. Quirk a single eyebrow at her. She’s attempting to get her tongue up her left nostril. This is the same woman who cracked a firewall protecting hard targets for eighty-seven different Insurrectionist cells within the UNSC. She gives up on the tongue thing and puffs her cheeks out instead.

“Yeah,” snorts York, flipping his pancake onto a plate, “because Maine is the kind of person they send to fight _humans_. Sure. Hey, Carolina are you actually going to eat these pancakes?”

“Yes.” Carolina is typing something on her datapad now. Her hair is in her eyes. “I’ll eat them.”

“How? Where are you putting it? I’m not entirely convinced about where you say you’re putting all the grilled cheese.”

“Shut up and make my pancakes.”

Connecticut is making kissy faces at you. Glare at her. She takes your goddamn knight.

 

***

 

Something is wrong.

Connecticut has been silent on the text COM for almost twenty minutes. Her last missive of _hold position_ having been entirely uninformative and you’re getting agitated. You’re agitated because the mission briefing was too short and Connecticut said, at one point, “Sir, with respect, that’s not a lot to go off of.” Then she was nervous the whole flight out.

Her nervousness is rooted, mostly, in the fact they didn’t have the personnel to spare for a multi-agent extraction team. You are the extraction team if this goes south. Usually, that wouldn’t trouble you… except that twenty minutes ago, Connecticut tersely informed you that Command’s intel was wrong. The Insurrectionist light frigate has three times the personnel strength speculated. You relayed this the _MoI_. Command passed back clearance to proceed with mission. Connie was not happy. You’re… anxious.

_maine._

The sudden message on textCOM spawns up across your HUD, ticks your pulse up just slightly. Connecticut is still maintaining field silence.

 _status?_ – you send back.

_disabled the landing bay turrets._

“Shit,” says Four-Seven-Niner, who is also on the COM.

_yup. calling in the cavalry now. expect hard extraction. full weapon load out. niner, you need to ground their fighters._

“Gonna be a shitshow,” says Four-Seven. “Hey, Goliath. Load up. ETA, Connie?”

_2 minutes. I’ve started the data transfer. need the bay clear, then pick us up._

You send – _got it_

_be careful, maine_

Two minutes later _Fatass_ rockets into the enemy hangar bay and unloads a full missile barrage directly into their parked fleet of aircraft. This is, you know, insanity – flying into the mouth of an enemy ship, but Four-Seven does it like it’s standard. While the explosions distract everyone, you bail out the back of the ship and dart along the far wall, slapping sticky grenades to the sides of ships as you go. You and three tactical shells of nitro-core C-4 make it all along the far wall without detection before an enemy solider steps in front of you, turning around just in time to see you sprinting at him. You uncap the first soldier’s skull with your fist and smear the contents of his head like a dark egg against the wall. The blood – bright red, not blue. It’s your first human kill

You don’t really notice.

You’re too busy bowling the active C-4 into the guard house. You kill seven men with the first core and half a magazine from your M5. The next core blows ten men apart as they enter the hangar together through a cargo elevator. You put the explosive in the elevator with them right as the timer runs down. The last fist of C-4 you strap to a fuel drum and kick that drum down a hallway. You then set it off with a shot from your sidearm and ignite the whole corridor and, everyone inside in rocket fuel. The roar is deafening. So are the human screams as they burn alive. It shakes you, for a split second, that screaming.

Looking back, that moment where you hesitate is likely why you don’t actually see the RPG. The explosion blows you off your feet and part of a parked Hornet through your lower intestine. At first, you don’t feel it. You feel the impact, like being punched, your back slamming into a wall. It’s only after a second, when you look down and see the twisted shard of steel, a full meter in length, jammed through your belly that the pain seems to catch up. Blood rushes into your mouth and you gag liquid copper.

Biocomm flares red, flags you critical. CT will know you’re dying.

Your armor injects pain killer automatically, but nothing is going to distract from the meter long shaft of sheared metal in your guts. The second injection is bio-foam, all of it at once. The needles punch into your ribs and hiss into the perforated cavity of your abdomen, cauterizing bleeds and expanding to hold organs in place. The foam burns. Filling your body with heat until everything goes white, until it feels like the foam is going to flood out your mouth and into the back of your eyeballs. It burns. The agony rolls on and on through your body, relentless and unending and…

You wake up to the sound of your HUD beeping at you, informing you with machine efficiency that you’re dying, as though you didn’t know. Blood is running down your belly, your inner thighs, dripping down your leg and pooling on the floor beneath you. You’re sitting fetched up against the wall the explosion knocked you into. Your whole body dedicates every living nerve inside you to the task of burning, pulsing, agony. You can’t move. You can’t hardly breathe. The only thing holding you together is your suit, the biofoam inside you, and your armor. There is biofoam leaking from around the metal, sealing at the point of penetration. The life support suite struggles to keep you alive.

You’re still dying, just in slow motion. 

The mission is not over. You don’t know Connecticut’s status. There are figures moving toward you in the fire, winding through the wreckage and soon they will have a clear line of sight on you. It’s difficult right now to stay conscious with a fucking thing through your belly, but you still pull your sidearm from your hip. You retch blood into your helmet until the pain from retching is enough to make your vision swarm. Accept the circumstances of your death.

You shoot the first person you see right in the chest, knocking them off their feet and the others scatter while you open fire on them. It’s a twelve shot mag. You’re down to six shots and you can’t see straight. Another dose of painkiller and your head goes fuzzy, or maybe it’s the blood loss or the shock. You’re going pretty rapidly into shock and it _hurts so fucking bad_. You can feel every arduous clench of your heart as it struggles to circulate blood through your pulverized body.

You fire off three more shots, which miss pretty badly. You’re down to three shots when someone finally shoots you back. The bullet punches into your upper shoulder armor, lodging deep in the muscle of your bicep. Lose your gun. A grenade lands next to you and adrenaline alone powers your wild lunge away, just far enough that the explosion misses you, but the impact of moving jars the metal in your gut, ripping wetly, snapping already fractured bone and your world goes fucking blue white and static and  –

 “Ho-lee shit,” says someone, “would you look at this? The fucker is still alive.”

“Looks like a SPARTAN,” says another someone, a blur standing over you. “Are we being hit by SPARTANS?”

“Nah.” One of them, the one the middle shakes her head. “This is some other UNSC fuckery.” Your vision briefly focuses. You see the snub-nose military issue pistol in her hand. You’re lying on the ground, one arm under you, one hand gripping the metal where it’s stuck out of you. Every time you breathe the wet friction of it in your gut pulses red. There is blood in your nose and mouth and the woman is laughing a little. “Son-of-a-bitch is _tough_ like a SPARTAN, isn’t he?” She aims the pistol at your head. “Better do him like a SPARTAN.”

“No. We’re taking this one alive.”

“Are you _fucking_ kidding?”

“I’d like to know who’s killing us, wouldn’t you?”

“No. I’d like to put down the fucking dog, sir.”

The other man says nothing, but it must be answer enough.

“Fine.” She points the gun at you, the muzzle wavering as she takes lazy aim at your other shoulder. “I’ll just make sure he can’t take a swing at us.” Biocomm says your pulse speeds up, your breathing easing toward hyperventilation. The Insurrectionist tilts her head at you. “This is happening, freak. No point crying about it. So be a good boy, hold still, and I’ll try not to puncture a fucking lung or –”

She breaks off screaming when a 12-inch combat knife appears, suddenly, lodged in her forearm – the blade having been thrown with such force it punched through one side and out the other, spurting blood, a wedge of bone splintered from the fabric of her sleeve. She drops her gun, shrieking and that’s when you see Connecticut. She’s sprinting across the hangar bay, a knife in one hand, a magnum in the other, flames behind her. She’s got no cover.

You forgot: she’s cleared for un-linked equipment usage.

Connecticut jags. Connecticut flickers. Her body pulls in two directions at once and none of those directions are the direction she is moving. She jumps a supply crate, flickers again and suddenly there’s ten of her, there’s twenty of her, flickering and darting. The whole legion bring simultaneous handguns to bear and the Innie squad fires full auto, all three of them unloading at the holographic horde. The clones jolt and vanish when hit. One goes down, screaming, and for a second it’s real. It’s Connecticut and hear yourself shout through the blood –

And that’s the moment the real Connecticut appears behind the female solider, grabs her jaw and snaps her neck with such force her whole head rotates on the spine. So convincing is her smokescreen that the men don’t notice her until she grabs one of them, yanks his chin up and rips the blade of her ka-bar across his throat. They die in confusion, lashing out at pixels and light, throats and arteries laid open in gouts of red. She puts that same knife through the other man’s neck, then reloads her pistol (she was empty apparently) and shoots him four times in the chest and head. The last of her holograms wink out.

She’s kneeling over you.

“C’mon. Get up.” She grabs your uninjured arm and yanks it over the back of her neck, pinning it to her chest. “ _Get up, Maine_!” The pain has swollen into something greater than pain, has become static and color flaying down every nerve. There is piece of metal in your gut and Connie forces you on your feet. Your boots slide in your own blood and Connie swears through her teeth at you. “Get the fuck up, Agent Maine!”

The last thing you remember is the glow of _Fatass’_ thrusters swinging over you, Connie’s arm around your waist as she whispers, “ _Don’t die. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, goddammit_ …”

 

***

 

“Aw shit.”

You open your eyes. South Dakota is sitting in a chair next to your bed, her feet stacked up on the cot by your hand. The blond floss of her hair is lit up white gold under the fluorescents. She’s got a candy bar in hand, half eaten, a disgusted look on her scrunched porcelain doll face. It takes you a moment to register you’re in the recovery ward aboard the _Mother of Invention_. You’ve never been in the recovery ward before, but it looks precisely like all on-ship recovery wards look – polished sterile and entirely too bright. You squint into the overheads.  

South swings her feet to the floor, her boots thumping on the ground.

“Connie’s gonna be pissed. Bitch has camped her ass out here for twenty-four goddamn hours straight and the fuckin’ second I tell her to go take a piss and wash the stink off, you choose right now to wake up, you disrespectful fucknut.” She stands up so she can look down at you. She looks categorically unimpressed, bites off another noisy chunk of candy bar. She chews while talking at you. “You heal pretty fast, motherfucker. Then again, Connie says she put enough bio-foam up your ass, you’ll prolly _taste_ the fucking stuff for a week. It was so gross. You were, like, foaming the gunk out the part where the metal was sticking out. I have pictures –”

You kind of start to zone out.

South doesn’t seem to mind though, she continues to describe in graphic detail the grossness of your nearly fatal wounds. You run a hand down over the flat of your stomach, feel the bio-mesh and bandages as a lump under the thin white material of the hospital shirt. Your shoulder is stiff and sore, but moves when you rotate it. South is stuffing the rest of the bar in her mouth. She produces another from her back pocket. You suppose there’s something soothing about South Dakota’s easygoing assholery. After a while listening to her swear companionably at you, you figure it’s because she sounds like a Marine. Her fluency suggests she was one.

 “Oh no,” she says when your eyes start to close again. “No, fucker, don’t pass again. Oh, fine, do what you want. Fuckin’ idiot…”

The sound of South’s chewing follows you into unconsciousness.  

 

***

 

One week later, Connecticut shows up at your door in a purple and green sweat shirt that doesn’t belong to her, smelling slightly of Lucky Strikes and hand lotion. She blinks up at you. When you were discharged from medical, Connecticut was off ship on another mission. It’s 2AM and she is, apparently, back. She’s barefoot, two handguns hanging in a holster over her shoulder, her boots in one hand, and you don’t know what to think about any of that that. Presently, you think she seems very small in another woman’s clothes.

She holds up one arm, showing you the six pack hanging off her fingers.

“I have beer.” She says this so confidently, so victoriously, you suspect she stole the beer like she stole the sweatshirt – from a sleeping Dakota twin. When you don’t move, Connie leans against you, wedging her shoulder into it as one might a stuck door. “Shhh.” She leans on you a bit harder, pressing her elbow along the inside of your left hipbone. You’re not healed. Not really. So the slight pressure unravels a deep bolt of red heat through your belly. “Let me in. Before South wakes up!”

She’s gleeful with her crime and you allow her to dislodge you from the doorway so she can scoot past, gaining access to the interior of your room. Her passing, once the sudden pain winds downs, leaves a warm ghost of pressure against the front of your body, just below rough strip of bio-mesh still knitting your abdomen up. Once she’s in, tap the control panel and close the door. Scowl as the other Freelancer clambers onto your bunk and arranges herself with beer on the bed, hand guns on the footlocker, tugging her hood down around her neck.

“I didn’t want to sleep over with South.” Blink at this announcement and fashion the scene ten minutes ago: Connie rolling off South’s bed and quietly padding around, stealing her stuff. Suddenly South sitting in for Connecticut in medical makes more sense. “She squirms in her sleep,” she explains, as though you asked.

Think about Connecticut snapping that Insurrectionist’s neck, so hard her head rotated on the stalk of her spine. She’s flopping dramatically back and forth on your bunk, complaining of the lumpy pillow, limbs flailing. Think about her yanking the interrogator’s head back by the hair, the red mouth she laid open across his trachea, how it gaped briefly wide under the dead weight of his body. Connecticut rolls over, pries a can from the pack, snapping the lid open. Watch her take a long drink from the can, the muscles of her throat moving once, then twice.

“Want some?”

The rim of the can tastes like her mouth. The beer tastes like something someone strained out of dish towel. Hand it back. This seems to please Connecticut who makes more room for you on the mattress, then goes about the business of pulling her handguns apart on the footlocker. Warily, after about two minutes of watching her, you take a seat next to her and watch her clean her weapons while drinking. She powers down each can one after another.

About five cans later she says, “I after I got back today, I wanted to come see you straight away, but I was chicken.” A shrug. She scratches her neck. “I’m glad you’re not dead.” You nod. You too are glad you’re not dead. You share a companionable victory silence, broken eventually by Connecticut saying, annoyed, “did you know that the reason we were even out there is being the Director is in some kind of pissing contest with other special projects? Wanted to have something to show them at the next review. That’s why the rush job on the intel.”

You’re not sure how to feel about that. It’s clear how Connie feels about it.

“I mean, we got it done, but just because he knows you can survive some shit, doesn’t mean he should put you through it, you know?”

You shrug.

“We could have waited,” Connie says, glancing at you. “Done it right.”

Another shrug. Connecticut keeps looking at you and you can’t read the way she studies your face or what she’s looking for in your silence. Some agreement, you suppose, that getting your guts sheared to pieces over a data pull and shitty command logic was not right. You’ve been over that thinking for years now. Two years at least. You sigh, reach up, and run your hand furiously back and forth across the long part of her hair, whipping it up into a staticky poof. That done, you inspect your handiwork and wait. This, probably, was not the sign Connecticut was looking for but she accepts it stoically, nodding.

“Jerk,” she says, with as much affection as you can remember her using. She scrapes her hair back behind her ear. “I’m sorry, by the way. That I couldn’t get the data pulled without setting off that alarm. Sorry I was slow.” And when you give her a look she adds, “If it was Carolina, she would have been to you faster.”

Plant a hand against her shoulder and shove, once, bowling her over.

“Stupid,” you say, because _you pulled off a multi-simulacrum holo-smokescreen with no server pipeline_ is too many syllables for you. 

Connie rights herself. “You’re just not gonna be mad about any of it are you?”

“No.”

She taps the back of your bare hand. Let her.

Her fingers settle on the dark lines of scar tissue there, the sleeves of her stolen sweatshirt pooling at her wrists, her bare knee dug slightly into your thigh when she leans over. You are aware of her body the way you are aware of a gun in a room. She flattens her hand over your fist like a game of rock paper scissors. Her hand is not big enough to cover yours though.

“Carolina doesn’t have any scars like this,” says Connecticut, no preamble to her sudden change of topic. Her eyes are on her hand now, her thumb stroking the top knuckle of your thumb. “From her muscle grafts and stuff. She’s had a few, but the tech they use to seal up the skin afterward is… I dunno, it’s pretty amazing. No scars unless you look close.” She glides two fingers down the parallel scars running down the back of your hand to your wrist, tracks the path of the scar up your inner arm. Tickles. Casually, she says, “I _know_ this isn’t from a muscle graft.”

When she doesn’t elaborate _stare_ at her.

Because saying she knows, even _implying_ she knows, what gave you the scars… it knots something in you. The instinct that she shouldn’t know or be talking about it. She sighs, drops her forehead against your shoulder so the heat from her head radiates through the fabric of your T-shirt. Her hair flicks your chin, tickles. She smells like the locker room dispenser soap.

“Freelancer is a volunteer only outfit.” She nods, somewhat heavily. Her tone has an edge now, like one of her knives. “When you have a 46% casualty rate it has to be _volunteer_. I better have signed a fucking paper and when you get tasked as team fixer, you better have known it, you know?” She looks up at you. “I volunteered. I’m just wondering if you did too.”

Say nothing. You think Connie does this – this thing where she asks questions she shouldn’t, because she can. Don’t confirm this for her. Just look at her, study the way part of her bangs shift when she blinks up at you, waiting for the answer she seems to know isn’t coming. Wonder if she told you… just so you know that she knows. To create something between you two.

 “Sorry.” She pulls your hand up suddenly, plants a kiss on your knuckles – misses your startled look – and goes back to weapon maintenance. “It’s nothing, Maine. Forget it.”

The back of your hand retains the shape of her mouth and the moisture from her breath for whole minutes after. Connecticut stays up with you and when, finally, she falls asleep curled on the bed beside you, Agent Maine, just lie there and think about what she said. Decide it really is nothing. At 4AM, when Connie quietly slips off your mattress and soundlessly leaves your room, wait until she’s gone before rolling over and lying face down on the warm space where she laid. Go to sleep.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Any comments or feedback are extremely welcome. Feel free to point out any errors because I'm horrific at proof-reading my shit.


	3. Washington

Agent Ohio doesn’t maintain field silence. 

This doesn’t, actually, surprise you because it’s been clear to you since she transferred up for Massachusetts that she’s the kind of terminally ignorant fuckwit that excels in getting themselves and their squadmates killed in combat. Used to be that didn’t bother you.

The problem is terminally ignorant fuckwits are not what you are used to anymore because after a year in the Freelancers, your standards have changed and you cannot fathom how Ohio got this far without smearing her fucking insides across an alien moon by now. She’s hunkered next to you, bouncing a little in excitement. This does not have the same charm that South Dakota has when she does this because you’ve watched South beat an Elite’s skull open with the stock of her empty rifle, so _South Dakota_ can sing Top Twenty pop lyrics and smoke Lucky Strikes in the forward lounge and not get decked for being unbearable.

Freelancer tolerates a certain threshold of bullshit provided you can do your job.

“I could fucking pop one of them right now.” Grab the barrel of Ohio’s sniper rifle and _shove_ it sideways. Glare at her. “Oh, c’mon. I’m kidding.” You’re not entirely convinced she was. You let go of her rifle only after a prerequisite amount of glaring. “Do you really do this all the time? Just fuckin’ sit here doin’ nothing for hours?”

Open a textCOM.

 _no chatter –_ you sendvia HUD, then open another textCOM to Connecticut. Your position is about a quarter mile out from the west edge of the Insurrectionist compound. Three hours ago, Ohio and CT infiltrated the compound to plant a bomb and retrieve intel respectively. Ohio came back to rendezvous in a timely manner. CT did not. Unlike Ohio, however, Connecticut understands the concept of radio silence.

_eta?_

_dl is slow –_ Connie sends, the words populating across your HUD, followed by a frowny face.

You’re not sure how you feel about the frowny face, given that Connie has likely severed some spines during the course of this infiltration. Acknowledge this: like Florida, there is something just slightly _off_ with Connecticut. The difference is, unlike Florida, you don’t want to deck her every time she looks at you.

 _boo-hoo –_ you send back. _eta?_

_back in a jiff ;)_

Annoyed, partly by the smiley face, mostly because you recognize the colloquialism as one she shares with Florida, you send – _jiff?_

 “Seriously,” says Ohio, having ignored your uplink entirely. She’s elbow crawling back up over the top of the low wall, peering into the scope again. “Connie says the only reason we’re even out here is because the Director’s trying to compete with some civilian contractor for equipment and budget priority.” That Connie has been mouthing off to the newbie does not even remotely shock you. Ohio proclaims, with borrowed indignation, “I think that’s some bullshit. He needs funding so we get our asses planted out here. Bullshit, right?”

You say, “Shut up. Sit down.”

And, because Connie has not responded to your last interrogative, send – _status?_

“Maine.” Connecticut is suddenly on inter-team radio. “Get out of there. They have your position. Move _right now_ they have your –”

Grab Ohio and yank her down, rolling on top of her just as rockets slam into the concrete wall you were using for cover and – _gonna fucking hurt_ – the explosion throws you into the street behind you. Instinctively ball up around the smaller Freelancer, skidding across the pavement, armor grinding up sparks behind you until you come to rest, bones aching, in the blasted road. Your skull rings. Your HUD is flashing.

“Holy shit!” says Ohio, extracting herself from your bear hug. “That was close!”

Grab a frag grenade from your utility belt, roll, and laboriously hurl it toward the source of the rockets. You’re rewarded with the frantic scramble of Insurrectionists bailing from their cover to your four o’clock. Ohio is already standing up, opening fire on what you recognize as full auto, hitting one of the Insurrectionists so rapidly she blows a full chunk of his jaw off before the impact spins him into the dirt.

“Welcome to the shitshow, fuckers!”

Ohio reels off this line just in time for an Innie with a SRS 99 Anti-Material sniper rifle to square a clear shot. 

The bullet punches through Ohio’s head with such force it actually manages to bust out through the back of her helmet. The sound of the shot catches up a split second later as her body hits the dirt next to you, a slap of blood splattering out of the blown visor of her helmet. She’s flatlined on inter-team biometrics and you’re already moving. You take her combat rifle, her detonator tablet, and three sticky grenades from her utility belt.

Thumb the triggers on all three grenades and stick them to Ohio’s armor.

Then take your teammates’ rifle and sprint down a side street, full speed toward the compound. You know, very shortly, they are going to try and flank you and if you’re going to be flanked, you’d like them to work for it. Which is when you hear the jeep roaring down the road behind you.

 “ _Shit_ ,” says Connie aloud on COM. She must have gotten Ohio’s KIA over biocomm. “Maine? Answer me. Maine?”

To the Insurrectionists, what you do must appear insane. Turning around and bull-charging the armored jeep chasing you would seem pretty crazy for most. For you, it’s a quick way to get a jeep. Sprint head-on into the vehicle then jump – the force amps in your leg armor launching you up, blindingly fast for your size and weight. The Innies shoot and miss.

Land with a boom on the hood, Ohio’s high-power carbine in one hand. Fire one-handed full auto into the passenger side of the vehicle, painting up the insides in blood, bullets shearing the driver’s head from his shoulders, blowing the leg off the machine gunner at the knee and knocking him off the back of the jeep. Then grab the center roll bar, use it as the fulcrum to swing up and kick the screaming passenger and the corpse out of the vehicle. The Warthog bounces and slows, speed-bumping over the fallen Innies, who are crunched under the back wheels.

No time for textCOM, open inter-team radio. “Here.”

Connie’s abandoned radio silence anyhow. “I’m calling in the beta team.”

Well, you must really be fucked.

“Maine, you need to get out of there. I’m in their COMs and they’re all converging on you.”

Of course they are. Shift gears and hit the gas, the stolen Warthog roaring through the streets. The sparkling storefronts and burned out department stores whip past, the speed ripping up rotted newspaper from the gutters. There is a billboard in the distance, perforated, kinked down the middle by missile fire, for some kind of beverage brand you don’t know – red , white, and blue logo, the colors swirled together while a smiling girl with the top of her head burned off presents the can.

As the jeep fishtails around a corner and down a bomb-blasted side-alley, there is a split second where you think about advertising, about people with jobs that revolve around thinking of ways to sell things like drinks to people. You’ve never seen a city that wasn’t a war zone. Everything you know about civilian life is the way archeologists know about it – by examining the wreckage. The jeep bounces over potholes, popping the vehicle up and down, the front fender bulling a tossed garbage can out of the road.

 “Head east. I’m adding a marker to your HUD. The beta team can meet you there.” Beta team. You can’t remember the last time Alpha Squad needed to call in a beta team. There are multiple Freelancer squads, Alpha is simply the squad with the best performance and highest security clearance. If CT is calling one in just for you, then there must be a lot of personnel coming for you. So it’s somewhat surprising when she asks, suddenly, “Do you have Ohio’s detonator?”

“Yes.”

Because blowing up the ops control HQ is part of the mission objectives. Of course you got the detonator.

“Okay. Do _not_ blow the charges.”

“Why?”

“Because I had to fall back and I’m _in_ the goddamn building, Maine.”

For a moment you don’t believe her. You don’t, because she could not possibly be _stupid_ enough to go back into the building that Ohio was specifically deployed to blow up. Push that thought away for later and, instead, demand, “What part?”

“Excuse me?”

“What _part_?”

“ _Excuse_ me?” Clearly she’s kenned that you would like to set off a charge to cause a distraction… while she’s in the same building. There is a pause. “Southeast corner, third floor, subsidiary server room. Can you blow the northwest charges alone?”

You’re already parked, messing with the radio detonator because you really cannot afford to fuck this up. Technically, you’re not trained for this, but it’s got a layman’s interface and almost two years ago, Seattle gave you a crash course on daisy-chain detonator sequences. The marker on your HUD continues to blink. Ignore it. Focus on the little screen on the tablet between your hands, querying what detonation frequency you would like to use. Switch to individual frequency, unhooking one large pack of weapon-grade nitroglycerin charges from the radio-triggered daisy-chain Ohio set-up. Try to ignore the part of you that wants CT to explain what the fuck she’s doing back in that building in the first place.

“Are you doing it?”

Grunt an affirmative.

“ _Northwest_ , Maine.”

“Tch.” Lock the detonation, the hefty tablet in your hands blinking for the manual trigger command. Uncap black plastic push switch. “Ready?”

“Okay.” Connie breathes in and out, rapidly, like a swimmer hyper ventilating before the plunge. “Do it.” There’s a slight delay after you thumb down the switch. Then, in the distance, a dull boom, the vibration reaching you on a lag half a second later. Wait. Slowly, rising: the sound of siren. “There we go,” says Connie, “See you in twenty, motherfucker.”

You snap the detonator to the mag-strip on your thigh, put the car back in gear, then gun it down the alley toward the rendezvous. There’s another car coming up the street behind you. Ignore it. In the chaos they may not know exactly what they are looking for. Not, mind, that your EVA-class power armor config is hard to miss. There are probably twenty of them total in existence and, honestly, they’ll mistake it as SPARTAN, if nothing else. Check the rearview. Light-armored truck, four-man squad onboard. They don’t seem to be chasing you specifically, just driving on the same road. Maybe they won’t –

They shoot out the back tires and your stolen vehicle instantly starts to swing wildly to the right, then the left. Another spray of bullets shreds a path from the tailgate up the passenger side of the jeep, shooting out more of the windshield. A ricochet strikes off the inside of the dashboard, slams with a bone-snapping impact into the meat of your right thigh, punching through the armor and lodging shallowly in your leg. Snarl, yank the wheel hard right, spinning it into a length-wise stop and diving out the door just as another stone-shredding spray of bullets rips up the inside of the vehicle.

Do not take cover behind it. Unlatch your rifle from your back and sprint across the road just in time to hear the Innies ram your vehicle with theirs. By the time they recover from their deliberate collision, you’re already ducking inside a building. A restaurant maybe. Hurdle the bar, racing back through the service exit because you know exactly what they’re going to –

Large gauge bullets explode through the front window, blowing tables to splinters and destroying shelves lined with dusty bottles and ancient champagne flutes, spraying glass like shrapnel against the back of your helmet. Race out the exit at the back of the store and out into an enclosed courtyard. Scan for exits. Find none. Turn around but there are already shadows moving in the door you came through. 

 _Great_.

It starts to rain.

The water pings against the top of your helmet and when you look up the small square of gray sky five stories up seems to open and pour out -- volatile sheet, steaming as it hits the concrete, dousing you instantly. Breathe. Assess the courtyard, then take cover behind the low wall lining the perimeter, crouching behind the corner where it converges with a stone pillar. Hunker down, rifle stock set against your shoulder, and take aim at the door now opposite your position. 

They will outnumber you, but they must come through the choke point at the door, if they’re stupid, if they rush and just come through the narrow tunnel into your sights…

Two grenades – a smoke and a frag – fling out through the hole in the barricade.

Damn.

The explosion takes a chunk out of the pillar, knocking dust from the ceiling, and the courtyard fills instantly with white gas. Swap to motion-tracker, your HUD flashing green and igniting white as the VISR tech picks up motion from the falling rain and lights it up blinding. Shut it off and crouch with your back to the pillar. Through the rain, you can still hear them – their boots on the wet concrete. Two soldiers crouched at the door, your only exit, and two coming around on your right to flank you.

Half a mag left, three spares on your person.

“Hey, you!”

Check your HUD. No link ups from beta team.

“You surrender and we won’t kill you.”

Liars. If they don’t shoot you when you step into the open, they will execute you in the street shortly thereafter. Insurrection isn’t big on prisoners of war. Iowa, three months ago, taught you that.

CT opens inter-team suddenly. “Beta team should be right on top of you.”

Breathe in. The smoke is nearly gone now, your back armor scraping against the brick behind you. Can’t believe four Innies in the back of a restaurant is what’s threatening you right now. You can take a lot of bullets before you die, Agent Maine, and _apparently_ beta team is right on top of you so the flight back to medical should be short. Probably. Breathe out.

“Maine, don’t do anything crazy. Back up is coming.”

Brace yourself for what comes next. Queue a morphine injection. Even as the warmth slides into your muscles, your body remembers every bullet, the three-foot shunt of steel that punched through your gut, the scars inlaid to your carbide ceramic bones. At mid-range their numbers neutralize the advantage of the armor and your strength. At best… you charge them, hope they aim for your chest armor, kill the ones guarding the door and get out to better maneuverability. High probability of taking bullets in the gut or worse, but it would get you out of the kill box here.

This won’t kill you. This will _not_ kill you. It will just almost kill you (again), Agent Maine. Connie says your name again over the radio and you –

Hear a shot. Two shots. A scream.

Another shot and a hissing sound, like a rope ripping too fast through a steel eyelet and one of the Innies shouts, “What the fuck is –!” A volley of shots. Something heavy hits the ground behind your cover and that heavy something opens fire with an M5. When you look, there’s a Freelancer in dark gray armor standing with his back to you, firing at the last two Insurrectionists who’ve taken cover behind the far wall where he keeps them pinned. The muzzle flash lights up the yellow paint on his shoulder guards, rain dripping off the weapon in his hand.

“Agent Maine?” One of the Innies lifts his head up just a fraction from behind cover and gets a bullet instantly to the face. The trajectory of the shot blows a gout of blood in a high splatter against the brick wall. New guy does not look away from where he’s shooting. “Hold on a sec. Lemme just –”

Then he’s moving, darts low, still firing. Every bullet hits the top inch strip of the wall the last Innie is hiding behind, keeping them pinned where they are. The new Freelancer vaults the wall, fires straight down behind it and lands. Silence. The sound of rain beating against the tin sheeting overhead. The other agent coughs a little, bends, and stands again with mags in hand, blood on the casings.

“There’s another squad of them outside.” He climbs back over the wall, rain sluicing over his armor. He’s not very tall, about York’s height, with a standard armor config – the motor-cross style helmet with the visor guard, Duraplex face shield polarized gold. He holds out the spare mags, blood rinsing away under the rain. When you take them, he tucks the butt of his rifle back up into his armpit and kind of stares up at you. “You are Maine right?”

“Yeah.”

He laughs. You don’t know why. “I’m Washington.” Snap a new mag into your rifle. Washington jerks his chin down. “You’re bleeding.”

Glance down at your leg. The rain is washing a winding red snake of blood down your thigh. Shrug.

Washington shakes his head. “Some things never change.”

And without explaining that, he snaps his rifle to his back, then reaches past your shoulder, grabbing something. He steps back with a Kevlar-fiber cord between his hands. Ah. He used it to rappel down the wall from the roof. Meaning he shot two soldiers dead while rappelling at speed down the wall. Meaning Agent Washington was probably up there for a while, waiting for the smoke from the smoke grenade to dissipate for visibility.

He loops the rope into a snap at his hip, hooking it fast.

“There’s a balcony on the third story. I’ll cover you.” He unlatches something from his lower back, tosses it to you. When you catch it, it’s a sizable charge of C4 with a detonator pre-wired. Your weapon of choice in explosives. Washington’s reflex seems to be giving people equipment. “Uh, you know, just in case they give you any trouble before I get in position or whatever.” He kind of stares at you a moment too long, rain water dripping from the ridge of his visor guard. “Kay. See you in a second.”

He must trigger some HUD command because the rope suddenly goes taut and seconds later Agent Washington is zipping back up the side of the building. Watch him go, the dark shape of him as he kicks off the wall then swings back, crashing neatly through a window into what must be the third story. He’s gone and all that’s left to do is follow his lead. Go back the way you came, stepping over the dead Innies in the doorway. Their face shields are blown-in holes full of blood – meaning Washington shot them both, more or less, between the eyes while he fell.

He’s a beta squaddie.

There is not just one other squad but two of them parked outside. Your HUD pings an uplink. Allow it and Agent Washington’s voice pipes into your helm through the COMfreq saying, “I’m in position.” Your HUD marks out targets in red cursors, seven of them, as you move to take cover behind the wall near the front of the building. Washington, speaking low, says, “Taking out the machine gunners first. You fuck up the others. On my mark. Sync?”

“Sync.”

“Mark.”

You open fire simultaneously. The crack of a rifle, not yours, reports two times and the nearest gunner topples off the top of the jeep. Washington’s work, but the men on the ground only see you; six shots tear a man’s arm off, drives the rest to cover behind a pylon stack. Two more shots and the second gunner topples. The four remaining Innies have not noticed Washington on the balcony; they are too busy shooting at you. Arm the C4.

“Suppressing.”

“Yup.”

Washington fires a salvo into the side of the pylons, driving the Innies back to cover. While they’re down, stand up and throw the charge. It lands directly behind the pylons. Screams. The detonation blows the pylon stack, and the men behind it, apart. The rain washes the blood into the gutters. The count on your HUD is a minute and forty second since your sync with Agent Washington. Outside, Washington jumps down from the balcony, climbing over the guardrail, then swinging down from the bottom. He briefly hangs there like a kid from the bars of jungle gym, swaying before he lands with a thump, couched easy on the ground. Stands up and shakes the water ineffectively from his helmet. 

“Pelican is inbound. Connecticut is with them.” He wipes his face shield. “Sorry about Ohio.”

Shrug again, uncomfortably this time.

Washington rotates his shoulder like its stiff. “She was on beta before they bumped her. Worked with her for a few months.”

Shrug again because you don’t want to tell him his former teammate was loud and obnoxious and cocky and she died because of it. You don’t want to tell him, not because it’s disrespectful to call the dead idiots, but because it’s only half the reason she is dead. The Pelican arrives moments later, swinging down from the dark skies, the bay door yawning open as the ship bobbles slowly down low enough to jump on. Hop into the ramp, Washington behind you. Connecticut is standing in the back with two other Freelancers in dark green and one in gray with red accents. The rest of beta squad, apparently.

“Told you they were on top of you,” she says.

You almost tell her to fondly fuck off, but that’s the exact moment that Washington chooses to kick you in the back of your un-injured knee, knocking you down to a kneeling position. It doesn’t hurt, of course, but the unexpectedness of the attack startles you enough to snarl.

CT is vocal immediately. “Hey!”

“Do you _seriously_ not recognize me?” Washington complains.

Stand up and turn on him, fully prepared to throw him out the back of the back Pelican but as you move to, maybe, murder a fellow Freelancer, he laughs again and the bald-faced fucking assholery of it is so complete that it arrests you mid homicide. Washington reaches up and thumbs the release at the jaw of his helmet, the seal hissing slightly before he tugs it off completely. For a second, he’s just standing there in the mouth of the Pelican, the sky dark behind him as the wind beats the acid blonde of his terrible helmet hair against his head.

Seattle grins at you. “Did you fucking miss me?”

 

***

 

Debrief goes like this:

“How did Ohio die, Agent Maine?”

“Enemy fire.”

“And you followed field protocol in the destruction of her armor and equipment?”

“Yes.”

“And it was you who completed her assigned task of destroying the Insurrectionist command center after the enemy ambushed you and succeeded in killing your teammate?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Agent Maine, is it that whenever we assign the newer agents to you, they never seem to make it back from their mission?”

You don’t think he expects you to answer that so don’t say anything, just keep eyes forward and wait for the Director to finish looking at you the way he looks at everything – like a variable in an equation he’s trying to balance. In the year since you joined, he still looks at you like that, an inventory done in an instant.

He shakes his head. “Disappointing, agent.”

Discretely grit your teeth.

“Connecticut, all targets were destroyed and I’ve confirmed that you managed to copy and deliver eighty-six percent of their on sight logistical data. An acceptable pull, though I must criticize your efficiency in this operation, agent. Your delay in retrieving this data would suggest that you might have had ample time to pull a full back up. Why, might I ask, did you struggle with the timeframe for this operation?”

Her helmet, with its blocky almost insectoid lines and angles, gives nothing away. “My original position was compromised. I could not use the proxy server as I originally thought I would be able to. As such, I had to port in from a secondary position. Doing so cost me time on the clock, though it was well within the missions’ leeway parameters.”

“I see, so you do not view the loss of Agent Ohio and your subsequent need for the beta team to extract you as a failure on your part?”

“Sir, I was lead on this operation, so any failure during the course of the mission I do claim responsibility for.”

“Your ability to recognize the evident is noted, Agent Connecticut. Can you comment on the performance of the beta team when they were called upon to salvage this operation?”

“I have no issue with the performance of Agents Rhode Island or Nevada.”

“And Agent Maine, have you any comment on the performance of Agent Washington? Do you feel you could have handled your extraction without his aid?”

“No.”

Connecticut does glance at you then, visibly, her head slightly turning toward you.

“No?”

Don’t repeat yourself. There’s no explaining to your civilian commander that ‘handling the extraction’ does not mean surviving the mission solo with a gut full of bullets, but coming out of the mission combat ready for the assignment that follows. Could you have killed four Innies in a courtyard? Yes. Could you do it without likely getting said gut-full? No. Remember Washington shooting out two Innies in freefall. The spare mags. The charge of C4. His murmur on the COM: “Sync?”

“Very well. Agent Connecticut, as you were lead on this I expect you to file the primary after action report. You and Maine are dismissed for armor processing.”

“Yes sir.”

“Oh and one other thing.” You and CT turn back around. “I will be issuing a new team roster for Alpha Squad in light of Ohio’s death. Given his scores and Agent Maine’s recommendation, I will be reassigning Agent Washington to Alpha Team.” He’s looking at you when he says this. “He’ll be boarding before twenty-three hundred. Unless either of you have any objections based on your interaction with him?”

Connie glances sidelong up at you “I… don’t have any objections.”

Say nothing.

“Very well then. When he boards, see to it he finds the barracks and is fully briefed on training schedules and mission ops aboard the Mother of Invention. See that Carolina is informed of the roster change. You’re dismissed.”

Connecticut waits until you’re in the locker room, until you’re both stripped down to your drive suits, before she says anything. She’s inspecting her helmet, standing there frowning at it. She’s never liked her armor config which is different from the others’, uglier and ill-suited. The demolition suit works, but it’s not… her expertise. She clears for mid-level demolition, but she’s not a combat engineer. All requests for a different config have been denied. Eventually, helmet hanging from her fingertips, she looks at you across the locker aisle.

“So you worked with that guy from the beta team?”

Nod.

“Look, I know we’ve got that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, bullshit about discussing any pre-Freelancer military career stuff, but considering North and South most certainly know each other’s previous deployments and I know basically everyone’s at this point, I’d not get hung up on it. You can tell me if you and this Washington guy had any problems. We can straighten that the fuck out. We need to straighten this guy out?”

Shake your head.

“Wow, this is stoic even for you. You just worked with him then? Like the same unit?”

Don’t respond.

“Were you… _friends_?” She says the word like she’s worried it will offend you.

Nod once.

“Huh.” Connecticut bounds across the aisle and drops herself onto the bench beside you. “Welp. Guess I’m not enough of a psychological rock for you.” She clasps her hands to her chest. “Gotta get ya invested in the survival of the program, Maine!”

 _Look_ at her.

“Okay, okay. Just saying, the Director likes to recruit close, you know, personal recommendations, family, former squaddies, friends. I just wasn’t, you know, aware you had any of those.” She knocks her knee into yours. “He’s an asshole, by the way. You’re not allowed to replace me just because the Director found your boyfriend for you.”

“Stop.”

“Juuust saying.”

She doesn’t have to ask to know that you mean her meta-commentary on the chain of command its nebulous motives. The same shit she was, apparently, telling Ohio before this mission. You don’t have a problem with her most days, about this stuff, but today someone is dead so you have a problem. Big enough that even Washington’s arrival isn’t distracting you from it.

“Connie.”

“Hmm?” Her smile survives the half a second it takes her to read the look on your face. “What’s wrong?”

“You went back.”

“What?”

You can’t tell if she’s being obtuse or she actually isn’t connecting what you just said to the events of the mission. She’s looking at you, face blank, not understanding that you mean her going back into a live demolition target. You don’t think she is confused. You don’t think Connie doesn’t know what you are talking about. You think she’s buying time. That tenses something in you enough that your fingers on the release tabs on the back of your knee guard feel tight. When she continues not to follow, even after a moment to think about it, leave off with the armor so you can look at her directly.

“The mission.”

She blinks at you.

“You went back.”

“Yes.” She sets her helmet down on the table next to her. “I did. I had to plug in directly to their subsidiary servers to get what the Director wanted. I said that in there. It’s gonna be in the after-action report, Maine.” When you don’t answer, her brow knits. “You… don’t think I had to be there?”

“Didn’t tell me.”

“Didn’t tell you…? What? That I was in the building. Maine, I told you not to blow the charges.”

Lean forward. “ _After_.”

_After, Ohio was dead and you realized I might push the time table forward on the detonation._

CT maintains her calm, sitting there looking sidelong at you through the loose sheaf of her hair. “It happened fast, Maine, I wasn’t sneaking back into the building if that’s what you’re angling at.” She tucks her hair behind her ear, shaking her head. “Why would I do that if I didn’t have to? It was a building wired to _explode_. I wouldn’t go back there if I had a choice.”

 _But you could have called it out to your squad._ She keeps circumnavigating that, the breakdown in the logic. It’s a lot of words. How do you say it without saying the other thing: _You forced Ohio and I to wait and she’s dead now._ Or the other other thing: _You went against the Director’s orders._ Or the last thing: _You’re lying to me._

Before you can answer, work up a way to break down the complex thought in your head to a sentence you can goddamn articulate, Connecticut lays a hand on your knee.

“Maine.” She says your name with weight and you have to meet her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call it out. I knew the window to detonation was another forty-five minutes. If the timer had gotten down another fifteen, I would have said something. I wasn’t thinking, okay? I just…” She grimaces slightly. “I didn’t want the Director to know I did that because it was _fucking stupid_ and I could have gotten myself killed because of it. It _will not_ happen again.”

Her hand curls into a fist, pressing flat against your leg, bouncing her fist there a few times, nervously.

“Are we… okay?”

Her hand is still on your knee. The pressure feels good, familiar, CT talking to you after a mission. But there’s another pressure in your chest – the words you were trying to break down still there and, like a chemical build up, expanding in a gaseous effluvium somewhere in your lungs. Ohio lying dead in the street with her face-shield blown in, her skull a pulverized soup of bone and blood inside. CT with her hand on your knee waiting for an answer: _Are we okay?_

“Okay.”

She smiles. “Okay.”

Lean forward and take her helmet from her hand. She lets you have it. Ignore how the relief on her face creates that pressure again in your chest – bleeding away, but never quite leaving your body.

 

***

 

The problem:

Seattle died on Circumstance.

Or rather, that’s what you’ve been telling yourself for the past year. Or a narrative like that.

Part of you has assured yourself of his demise so continuously that it continues to do so even as Seattle/Washington arrives on the _Mother of Invention_ , disembarking from the back of an unmarked Pelican in UNSC greys. Unarmored, he’s middling height, about six foot three, still violently blonde, turning briefly on his heel to stop and thank the pilot who waves him off.

He could be anyone. Not Seattle. Not here in the _MoI_ landing bay, stepping over a painted yellow line on the floor like it’s a rule. Seattle was dead in a ditch on Circumstance, cut down by Sangheili Elites, spine severed in blue on blue friendly fire, incinerated in another doomed halo drop. He’s not digging in his pockets for something on the landing bay tarmac. As you’re thinking this, that’s about the moment he spots you. He looks away, then does a double-take.

It took him a second, you suppose, to recognize you outside the armor.

The strap of his rucksack digs heavy into the shoulder as he jogs the last ten meters to you. Don’t move. Wait. Washington reaches you and promptly bashes a fist into your shoulder with considerably more force than you were expecting. Blink. His grin cuts a lopsided dimple into the right-hand side of his mouth.

Then, “I fucking knew you weren’t dead.”

For the first time in a year, say, “Seattle.”

“Eh, no. It’s _Washington_ now.” He pretend dusts something off this shoulder. “What now, asshole? Now you can use one of _my_ codenames. How the tables have turned!” He laughs, then: “No, but seriously, if someone finds out my nickname was Seattle then I’m Seattle-Washington and that’s fucking lame.” He blinks at you. “It’s a geography joke.” Another blink. “Your call signs are literally states in the United States of America and you don’t – never mind.”

He heaves a big breath. You can tell, from the ten seconds this conversation has gone, that he’s not lost a step in stacking words into a silence, layering them up one after the other.

“Okay, okay so… let me just… okay. _You’re telling me_ that you get yanked from the front, from literally going one-on-six with the fucking hingehead Elites… get reassigned and…” He clenches his fists. “…literally join the next awful psycho outfit with a higher casualty rate than being a fucking grunt.” He hits you again, in the arm, harder. “Why couldn’t you pick a different super soldier program? One where we get paid a lot more? Do you get paid? I never asked you that, actually, and I swore I would ask you, so – do you get paid and if so what are you paid? Do they paid you in _actual_ money or UNSC tokens for vending machines – wait. Never fucking mind. Hold on.”

He abandons his thought to dig around in his rucksack.

He’s got helmet hair somehow. The heel of his right boot is so worn a gap yawns between the boot leather and the sole.

The shift in context is fucking with you, almost a violence in and of itself – the easiness of it. That Seattle might exist in a framework other than the battlefield on Circumstance feels wrong. The last memory you have of him: the day a Covenant kill squad started to dismember you in front of him and he stopped it. The last image you have of him is a medic shoving him out the back of the evac-Pelican, covered in blood, silhouetted by the MAC cannon fire in the distance. He looks rumpled and erroneously blonde, his freckles more pronounced now that he’s not covered in a fine grit of dirt, blood, and lechatelierite dust.

He’s dug something out of his bag, straightens and slaps it against your chest.

It’s a box of Short Change.

“Idiot.” You say it on reflex.

“He speaks!” Washington reshoulders his bag and falls into step with you, though you’re not sure where you’re walking with him so much as you need to appear that you’re going somewhere while you listen to him. “You finally find a group of psychics to fucking decode your field shorthand or do they just put you down somewhere in your shiny armor to draw fire while they do the actual mission?”

Ignore his question. Ask one of your own. “Recruited you?”

“Yeah.” Washington scratches the nape of his neck. “Two months after you were pulled out, I got back to regular command during one of the battalion shifts, hooked up with my actual unit. Command had me MIA with the rest of my unit.”

A shrug.

 “So, I got back to active in the system. Less than four hours before I’m oscar mike to another halo drop the Counselor shows up and says I’m pulled for command assessment or something. Then he asks me if I want to sign up. Right there. I sign on or I go back out and get in a SOEIV with everyone else.”

Washington is not smiling anymore.

Counselor. The parts of you reserved specifically for hating that man come to heat, like a wound pulsing blood.

“Your recruitment go anything like that?”

Hesitate, consider lying for his benefit. Then don’t.

“Hey.” Wash elbows you when you nod, warily. “It’s not like that.” A beat. “Maine. The drop I was slotted for. The Covvies fucking strafed outer atmo with heat seekers and smoked _everyone_. 80% casualty rate. That was my fucking chalk.”

Stare at him.

“Look, it’s not like we knew that was gonna happen. I wasn’t about to just jump ship. So I’m about to tell him ‘thanks but no thanks’ and go back to my chalk, but he says, suddenly, that you’re in the program. Says they recruited you and he asks me, theoretically, if I joined the Program would I have a problem working with you again.” He tilts his head. “Why d’you think he said that?”

You honestly have no goddamn idea.

Your face must say as much.

“I’m just bringing it up, because if you name-dropped me and got me on a short-list for Freelancer then the only reason the Counselor was there, four hours before I dropped, was you.”

The fucked up thing: You honestly cannot remember if you mentioned a sergeant named Seattle, if you called him by his name, the one you never actually called him by in the field because he never could call you by your name. On Circumstance, you were Short Change and Seattle and here, in this place, you are Washington and Maine and you cannot remember if, in some debrief, some part of the interview and processing, in some anecdote or report you wrote up…

Did you name him?

You think that you must have. Because the odds of Seattle being here are zero. The odds of his survival are none. If you did not name him and, by accident, tether him to yourself like a fucking lifeline then he is dead. He’s _still_ dead. Another dead Marine, one of an uncountable number slaughtered. You can’t tell him that. That you’ve been thinking of him dead for the last year. He’s laughing, a short single syllable ‘ha’ and readjusting the strap of his pack. His hair is too long, grown out of reg like every other Freelancer, throws shadows in his eyes when he looks up at you with his mouth crooked on one side.

“How’d you manage that?”

“What?”

“Saving my ass from half a goddamn star system away.”

And, honestly, there’s nothing you can say to that. Like you the Director’s fit him with a new name, fit him with a new skin – weaponized titanium interlocked and heavy as hell, not as heavy as SPARTAN armor but _close_. Think about Seattle putting your helmet on in the grass, lying there drunk staring out of your visor. Now imagine him putting on the helmet the Director assigned him, the polarized gold Duraplex staring back – a scaled down MJOLNIR profile – and suppose he must have, however briefly, thought of you the first time. Maybe many times.

The box of candy in your palm feels like he’s been carrying it around a while. Dented in the corners, moved from duffel to duffel for however long he’s been with the beta teams. Waiting to give it to you.

 “Don’t get misty or anything, asshole.” Washington is digging in his bag now for something else. “I joined up because I figured whatever you were doing… fuck, that’s where the fight _really_ is. Just do what I did on Circumstance and follow your terrible example, survive somehow. Why break a streak?” He glares. “If I’d known what a goddamn nightmare this whole program is, I might have just taken my chances with the hingehead seeker missiles. I dunno.”

Reach up and rest your fist on top of his head, then push down.

“Hey!”

Your dead Marine is alive.

 

***

 

“So you’re a new combat engineer, huh?” Carolina, seated on the table next to Washington, tilts her head a bit. “Director was pretty quick to bump you. Rest of the team isn’t even back from their latest op.” Her gaze, friendly but assessing, is familiar to you as she looks him over. It’s the same look she’s given the last three dead rookies to come through Alpha Squad. She upholds her current level of conversational ease, however. “You sure you’re good for the jump in mission level?”

Washington looks at her.

 “Well, boss,” he says (he calls Carolina ‘boss’, presumably because he wants to call her by her rank on reflex and has, instead, settled on ‘boss’ as an Freelancer Program alternative), “you have access to my quals. They’re higher than Ohio’s.”

“That’s not the question I asked you though.”

“We do dangerous stuff, boss. I know that. I’m fine with it. Sure, I’m nervous, but I’m not worried.”

“So how is it,” says Connecticut, coming to take a seat next to you, “that your scores were higher than Ohio’s but she ends up on Alpha?” She shrugs a little, ignoring the look you and Carolina slant at her. “If your quals were higher, than shouldn’t it have been you out there today?”

Washington shrugs. “Ask the Director.”

“So the Director has been… what? Not picking members based on combat quals?”

“I’m not touching that one. Hey. Anyone want a soda?” Wash digs around in his rucksack and produces a can. It has a red, white, and blue label with a brand name running down the side that seems familiar. Only after you have that thought does it occur to you that Washington packed cans of soda with him and that seems… odd. Give him a look that says as much. “What? They only ever have Coca-Cola in the vending machines. I know we’re at war with a genocidal species-ending alien race, but we’re not animals.”

“This guy?” Connecticut says, pointing. “ _This_ guy is the one you are friends with? This is the one I’m competing with?”

Carolina squints at Wash. “How many cases did you pack?”

“Just a six pack. I’m not crazy.”

Connecticut reaches across the table and takes the can from Washington – think of the billboard planet-side, the woman with the top of her head shorn off holding up the can. She waves the soda in a threatening manner at her new teammate.

“Pepsi is gross.”

“ _You’re_ gross.”

Take the soda can from Connecticut and snap the tab. There is a long silence while you take a drink, wrinkling your nose a bit at the carbonation. Set the can down and frown. Wash and Connie are both looking hard at you but, really, you just wanted to see what the fuck was apparently so good Washington needed to haul a six pack of it with him.

After an appropriately dramatic pause, say, “Gross.”

Connie slaps the table. “Ha!”

“Traitor,” Wash mutters. “Okay, fuck you, Maine, but answer me this: Who do I talk to about getting _her_ armor?” He points at Connecticut. “Because she’s got a demolition config and you can’t swap equipment on the beta teams.”

Carolina shakes her head. “Can’t do that on Alpha either, Washington. The armor load out you have is what you get until the Director says otherwise. You can submit for alternative weapon load out and auxiliary equipment. Sky’s the limit there.”

“Damn,” says Wash. “I was hoping Alpha Squad got privileges.” A slightly dramatic sigh. “Dreams shattered. But, on that, why does Connecticut get the demolition armor config? Isn’t she basically the team RTO?”

“Ex-fucking-cuse me?”

“Okay, you’re a _fancy_ RTO.”

“This RTO is going to kill you and make it look like death by erotic asphyxiation and everyone will believe it, because you give off that vibe. Also, my close quarters combat scores are higher than yours, sparky, so calm down.”

“Hey, Maine.” Washington evades Connecticut’s insult by pretending he didn’t hear it. “A question. Did you _pick_ your armor color or does the Director just really not like you or something?”

You knew he would get on that eventually.

“I mean the rest of you see that right?” Wash makes a vague hand-gesture. “You know… that Maine’s white?”

Connie and Carolina exchange a look. “Well,” begins Carolina diplomatically. “I wouldn’t say _white_ …”

“He doesn’t get enough sun,” adds Connecticut, “but I think he’s solidly _brown_. Like, sorta beige at least?”

Shove CT, sending her skating on her ass down the length of the bench.

“Har, har. I mean seriously.” Wash makes the same gesture at you – an interpretive semaphore of offense. “His armor is like reflect the fucking sun, ice-planet camo _white_. That can’t seriously be –” He looks at you. You don’t say anything but he goes, “Oh. Wow. Really?” Then blows air through his lips. “Fuck me then. Alright. Abominable Snow Maine. Super tactical, buddy. I’ll just stick with Agent Connecticut in the field, yeah?” CT slides herself directly into your side, jamming up close and grinning. “She looks like she’ll draw less fire. Or, you know, _not literally all of the fire_.”

 “Carolina is bright turquoise,” supplies Connecticut, somewhat eagerly.

“It’s also got an active camo unit, Connie.”

“But, boss.” Connie beams. “You have the prettiest blue-green aqua whatever-the-fuck-it-is paintjob ever.”

Washington is grinning. “That sounds ten times as tactical as the great white whale here.”

“I can tell you’re both going to be a tandem pain in my ass.” Carolina stands up, slaps Washington on the shoulder and leans on it. “I’ll be honest. I’m sick of burning rookies, Wash.” She says it mild. “I’m sick of cocky sons of bitches going home in body bags. So, tell me you know the numbers, greenhorn.”

 “Five in the last six months.”

“Right. Iowa and Vermont went down in combat.” When she says that, do _not_ react and she doesn’t look at you. She goes on. “Ohio lost her cool in the field. Same with Massachusetts. Utah was an equipment failure. And Georgia… uh…”

“What?” Wash blinks. “What happened to Georgia?”

“Look, just listen to Carolina,” says Connecticut. “She’ll keep you alive.

“Unless your equipment explodes. If that happens you’re fucked.”

“Right. Unless your equipment literally explodes, Carolina will keep you alive.”

“Yeah, but what happened to –?”

“Look, agent, the point I’m making is this outfit isn’t different than any other. I just need you to focus on doing your job and to do your job you need to not be dead. Understood?”

“Yeah, boss.”

 “Good. Hey, Maine. Got a minute? I want to talk you through some stuff.” Connie knocks her knee against yours under the table before you get up. Carolina points at Connecticut. “You.” She points at the table. “Stay. Talk to the newbie.”

Connie hisses.

“Bad, Freelancer.”

The last thing you hear as you and Carolina leave the mess hall is Connecticut saying, “Okay, he’s gone. Let’s compare notes.”

You try not to worry too much about the notion of Wash and CT alone and talking about you. Not that Washington will say anything because if he’s no longer Seattle then you are certainly not Short Change and talking about Circumstance is likely off-limits. (Not to mention against protocol.) That does not, however, necessarily mean he won’t speak in the vaguest of terms about your shared history and, probably, that time you threw someone in a latrine. Also that you don’t, in fact, like beer and may have been faking so CT would keep coming by to drink with you at 2AM. (You hadn’t foreseen this problem. Old friends knowing new friends. This wasn’t covered in your training.)

After you’re far away from the mess hall, Carolina turns to face you, waits quietly until a few technicians walk past and out of hearing before speaking.

“You okay? About Ohio?”

You’ve been expecting the question so shrug, but nod simultaneously. Carolina’s got her hands in her pockets, facing you squarely in the hall, surveying you. She looks at you so differently than the Director but with the same level of detail and comprehension. Her gaze picks out different variables though – plugs them into a different kind of calculation, real time and battlefield and forethought against the Director’s balancing of equation. She’s as close to an NCO as Freelancer can muster.  

“You sure?” She folds her arms across her chest, expression solidifying somewhat. “Heard the Director chewed you out a bit. Want to make sure nothing he said lands too hard because we both know he value judges on shit he shouldn’t. I read over that report and talked to Connie; there was nothing you could have done different.” A shrug. “Again. I know you know this, but you seemed quiet.”

You’d like to know her threshold for when you ‘seem quiet’ but don’t presently bring it up. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Let me know if you’ve got any concerns about that kind of thing. I can field some of that.” She shrugs again. “I also wanted to talk to you about Washington. You worked with this guy before. Connie says he did fine in the field. After action looked good. Beta write-ups say he’s good. Just wanted to square away if you worked directly with him? Can you work with him on a two-man mission or would that cause problems?”

Carolina does this. On a team this small, with a turnover this high, she has to.

“Worked direct.”

Her demeanor warms a bit, slants playful. “You guys _friends_?”

Roll your eyes. “Yeah.”

“You have those?”

Curl a lip at her.

“That’s a cute face. That must be what wins you friends and popularity, Agent Maine. That and punching people as a greeting.” Intensify the lip curling. “Okay, I wanted to check before I broke the bad news: The newest mission roster just came down. The Director’s pre-slotted you for four different deployments, all direct combat. That means you won’t be waiting on the wings on any of these like the last few times you ran back to back missions.” She waits for you to react. When you don’t really she adds, “You still okay?”

“ _Four_?” Give the number the incredulity it deserves.

“I know. He’s got me on back to back too. I’m on two of the assignments with you, two at a different clearance level.” When you remain quiet, waiting, she says, “It’s getting bad out there, Maine. It’s not for no reason. If we were on the frontline it would be much worse so, sorry, we don’t have room for complaining. You know that.”

You don’t exactly sigh, just exhale more aggressively than usual.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll be watching your back for two of the more difficult ops. The other two are group deploys, you, Connecticut, Wash, and Florida. A deploy with the Twins. It’s all stand up fighting. Nothing you’ve not seen before. Think the Director just wants us on the roster to make sure nothing goes sideways. If we had the luxury of surplus personnel and time, then you know the Director would deploy us accordingly. That’s not the case. Understood?”

“It’ll be fine,” she says. “Mission load and Project objectives are always changing, but I voiced my concerns. Director says the max is five back-to-back short deploy ops before an Agent gets pulled from active duty. I am assured of this.” She shrugs. “Well, as assured as I can be given the shit humanity has got itself into.”

“Tch.”

“Look, the Director says you need to report to C-deck. They’re doing equipment tests or something and you’re not the roster again for another seventy-two hours. Enjoy the downtime.” Then, when you fail to be enthused by the notion of equipment tests with the fucking Counselor, she smacks you in the chest. “Or don’t and just count down the seconds to our next deployment, you psycho.”

Smile at her.

“Get out of here, Maine.”

 

***

 

C-deck is a restricted lab section. The first thing the Counselor says, when he sees you coming down the hall is, “During your time in your previous outfit, were you ever assigned a full AI?”

The Counselor, as usual, doesn’t waste time on pleasantries. At least not with you. Think of Ellis, a hazy blue face peering up at you from a holo node.

Say, “No,” but with as much ‘go fuck yourself’ in there as possible.

The Counselor doesn’t pay that any mind.

“As part of your intake into Project Freelancer, we were given almost full access to your medical records. You are currently outfitted with a type two neural integration lattice. Do you know what that _means_ , Agent Maine?” You do, but the Counselor immediately says, “The neural harness currently implanted in your head does not only relay information to your armor, but is designed to tap sections of your brain for processing power in the event that an AI is ever docked into your armor.

“At this time, you are the only Freelancer outfitted with the advanced neural lattice and as such, the Director thinks your time off active duty would be best served in the lab. We have a prototype that we would like you to test.”

 “An AI?”

“Yes. A simplistic one. A combat program that will help Agents run more complex equipment in the field. As you know, Agent Carolina and Agent Connecticut are the only two Freelancers capable of running any Freelancer weapon systems without AI assistance and that, simply put, is not good enough. it’s been a priority to develop a means to eliminate such missteps. At this time we are looking into implementing the advanced lattice for all Freelancer personnel in order to improve field survivability. To be clear, the AI program will not be docked into your armor. This integration is more… direct.”

“How?”

“Excuse me?”

“Crystal layer,” you say. And when the Counselor continues to give you the same bland, condescending expression he always does when he’s refusing to link your sentence fragments, continue, “ _No. Layer_.”

“Oh, I see. No, we are eliminating the need for that piece of proxy hardware. No liquid crystal layer exists in your suit. Rather, the armor’s onboard computers can now be fully dedicated to combat and weapon systems that the AI can run wirelessly from the lattice. This would allow a semi-intelligent program to provide real time assistance in the field without need for an uplink to the _MOI_ command server.”

“Okay.”

“At this stage, the media we host the AI on allows limited bandwidth so the prototype we have is…”

“Dumb.”

“Yes. The chip cannot handle a Smart AI. As such, we’d like to see if the prototype’s behavior changes when integrated. Do you still feel up to the task, Agent Maine?”

Preface your response with a long unhurried stare, taking a few seconds to blink your silent incredulity that he’s even bothering to mask this as a choice. The short of it is he wants to plug a dumb AI into your long unused neural interface and see what happens. Eventually he takes your long and incredulous glare as a concession.

 “Good. Follow me.”

The labs on C-Deck are sterilized white and pristine. The technicians are faceless, masked with polarized face shields and plastic helmets, feeding live data to their HUDs even as they work on other projects. When you enter the lab, three techs in white jump-suits break away from the consoles where they are working to stand looking up at you.

“This,” says the Counselor, “is Doctor Clarke, Doctor Asimov, and Doctor Wells.” Those are definitely code names. “Doctor Clarke will be handling implantation. Doctor Asimov will be managing the data and analytics. Wells will be assisting as needed.”

“Hullo, Agent Maine.” The first woman, Clarke, has a smile in her voice. “Ready to change the world?”

“She is dramatic,” says Asimov, also a woman, with faintly Japanese accent. “Ready to run what will probably be one in a many very boring tests?”

“They’re both dramatic,” says the third technician, male-sounding. “Follow me, we need to run some scans and make sure you’re still good for a docking procedure at all.”

The male technician has you stand on a raised platform while a series of holo lights flicker scans at you. He asks you to unfold your arms. He asks you to look directly at one of the blinking nodes hanging from a mechanical harness in front of you. Asks you to take a seat on the padded examination table behind you. The toes of your boots do not quite clear the floor.

Doctor Clarke stands in front of you. A small woman, she is still looking up at you even in your seated position.

“I think,” says Doctor Clarke, after a moment to consider the logistics, “that you should lie down for this part of the procedure. Face down if you please.”

Shrug and swing your legs up onto the table, rolling over onto your stomach so you can fold your arms under your chin. Clark runs gloved fingers across the back of your head, gingerly probing the seam between the metal and skin. As she does, wonder what it would be like not to be a Freelancer, or a SPARTAN. If someone would ask you, before things happened, if you would be willing to do them.

“The new dock looks good,” says Clark, confirming your suspicion.

Don’t react.

‘ _New’_ she said. Meaning at some point during the Freelancer Program, during one of your many stays in medical, they surgically altered the pre-existing dock given to you during the SPARTAN Program. This is, of course, the first you’ve heard of it. Naturally, you sit up and grab Clarke by the wrist. When she screams, crush the ulna and radius like a chicken bones. But you don’t do that. The real you is refolding your arms and inclining your head slightly to the left so Clark can get a better look.

“I’m going to uncap the dock, Maine.” She shows you a small hand-held tool, like a gun but with a blunt, square muzzle the dimensions of the plug in your head. “This will uncap the implant. So if you feel pressure, that’s what it is. You may feel a slight discomfort, but please don’t move.”

She sets the small gun-like device against the back of your head, one hand laid against the back of your skull to steady her. The metal of the tool feels just like a handgun. The hand on your head feels familiar. This, all this, feels familiar. There’s a small click and a physical yanking sensation, then a sharp stab of pain that jags a sudden, hot path down your spine to your groin like a kick to the balls. Then it’s gone. You don’t move but your whole body goes tight and you stop breathing.

“Agent Maine? Are you alright?”

Nod. Breathe normally.

“Okay, everything looks good.” She turns away, picks something up off a tray nearby, and clips the small something into the gun. Then she shows it to you. In the end of the muzzle, is a small black metal square. From it, five short needles protrude. These, you see, must socket like a plug to an outlet in the lattice connected to your brain. “I’m going to replace the original cap with a live crystal data chip. On it is a partial AI program. It’s not ready for any kind of deployment, but we would like to get a gauge of its personality matrix and stability. Nothing fancy. Just analog. We want you to talk to it.”

“How?”

Because the AI being in the chip and using your bio-electricity and neurological processes for thinking is one thing, but that doesn’t mean it has the physical means to speak without a hardware interface. Like a person without a voice box. Clark turns to her colleague, Wells, who hands her your helmet. It is undamaged and clean. No sign of battery from your last mission.

“It’s been set to wirelessly interact with the radio in your helmet. Once it’s in, you should be able to speak directly with the program. There is no right or wrong here. We just need a baseline for the AI at this time.” She hands the helmet back to Wells. “There’s no need to worry, but I want you to be aware of some of the risks before we –”

“Skip the explanation, Doctor.”

Open your eyes and turn your head. The Director, at some point during Clark’s explanation, joined the Counselor. He’s standing, arms behind his back a lazy parade rest, watching.

“Maine hardly needs to be apprised of everything.”

“Yes, Director. Agent Maine, lie still. This may be… disorienting. If at any point you feel we must pull the AI, say so immediately and I will remove it. Do you understand?”

Nod.

Clark sets the gun to the back of your head again. Pulls the trigger. For a second, you feel nothing but the kick of the chip slotting, then nothing. Wait. Slowly, though, the heat comes. Like a fever spreading from the point of penetration through your head. Like a bleed hemorrhaging hot into your skull. Squeeze your eyes tighter, willing the sensation to subside. It does not. It becomes bearable, like a migraine, pulsing pins and needles behind your eyes.

“Are you hurt?”

Grimace.

“Discomfort?”

Nod.

“Can you proceed?”

“Yes.”

Sit up on your elbows and take the helmet from Wells. Do not look toward the Director or the Counselor. Pulling the helmet on muffles everything. Dampening everything but this hiss of static on the open COM. Wait. Wait for something to happen, for the voice like Ellis’ voice or like FILSS. The clipped almost human mannerisms of all the AI you’ve met. Wait. The static is getting louder.

Warily, swap to textCOM and send – _hullo?_

_“Beta.”_

Glance that the technicians, then try again – _What?_

_“Beta.”_

A moment then:

_“Beta.”_

Then:

_“Beta, beta, beta beta, beta, beta, beta, beta, beta, beta, beta, beta, beta beta, beta, beta, beta –“_

The AI’s voice in the COM is both male and female speaking at the same time and growing ever quicker in volume and urgency until it is volume almost unbearable to you, but it’s tone is FILSS calm and pleasant. The AI continues to loop for some five seconds more before the Director shakes his head.

 “The test is over, Agent Maine. Remove your helmet so Doctor Clarke can remove the chip. I believe the limitation is in the software. We will revisit this side project at a later date. You are dismissed to – Agent Maine, are you hurt?”

The question is so random, so pointed, it takes you a second to really accept that he asked it. Your helmet is in your hands now. You’re still lying on your stomach, leaning on your elbows, frowning at the Director. Slowly answer, “No?”

“You’re crying, Agent.”

Reach up and touch your face. Your fingers come away wet. Stare.

“Is it physical or emotional stimuli?” When you struggle with it, the Director says again, more pressingly, “Focus. Are you crying because you’re hurt or because of something else? Simply say ‘hurt’ or ‘else’, Agent Maine.”

“Else.”

The Counselor glances at the Director, then says, clearly, but calmly, “Program, beta does not exist. It is a false construct.”

The AI _screams_. 

Immediately hurl the helmet away from you. As though that will do anything about the sudden knife-point of heat that bursts like an embolism in your brain and for a second everything is blurred and ruinous. It takes you far too long to realize your crying harder than before, heavy wrenching bursts you've never in your life experienced. For a moment if feels like a seizure, not sobbing. The pain is not blood vessels bursting, but chemical panic. Grief so concentrated it locks up every muscle around the agony. If you could scream like the AI is still screaming, you would.  

“Agent Maine, we’re pulling the AI!” Clarke’s hand is on the back of your neck. “Please, don’t move.”

Press your forehead against your fists clenched tight against the gray foam padding beneath you. Breathe. Your eyes burn and blur. Feel the pressure against the back of your head, the metal and a yank that feels like she’s pulled something out from the root inside you and your head goes quiet and dark as the back of your own eyelids. Realize, only in the aftermath, the silence and the coolness that lives inside your skull when there’s nothing else living there. Don’t lift your head from your fists. Lie there. Breathe.

“Are you alright?”

Clarke has her hand pressed against the back of your head, over the docking port, as though to keep anything else out of it. Nod, lift your head and lever yourself into a sitting position, scrubbing your face with one hand. Clarke doesn’t ask you to lie down, she climbs up on the exam table to re-slot the original cap which sends a long jolt of discomfort running down your spine.

 “Emotional feedback?” The Counselor says this in a tone you don’t know. “Is that… even possible?”

“Of course it is. Emotions are just electricity in the brain. Look at this data.” Asimov is whispering, but you can hear everything she’s saying, her fingers ghosting over something on the console in front of her. She gestures when Wells and the Director gather near her. “The depth in the synaptic mapping. Are you seeing it? The original guide probes don’t seem to have mitigated random-walk growth in the front left hemisphere. Post-operative? You think that’s why the aphasia…?”

“Yeah, fascinating,” Wells is saying, also softly. “I don’t care how deep this thing unspooled in his head, it wasn’t built to house a full artificial intelligence like this. We need the suit’s liquid crystal layer –”

“Then you’re _useless_. The whole point is to eliminate that need. If it can’t live in them without the layer, we’re done.”

Do not give any indication that you can hear them, look at Clarke while she asks you to look into a scanner and please follow her finger with your eyes. The Director is wordlessly looking at the console screen while the other two argue, the screen-light reflected in his glasses.

“This program is too unstable. It doesn’t have enough neural paths of its own and using partial organic hardware isn’t enough if the software to begin with is too damaged to handle suddenly having billions of processors working in parallel. A Smart AI is too big to live in the lattice, the dumb ones are too… dumb.”

“We’re close. It’s just the… damage. The program _functioned_ in the lattice-only environment.”

“Functioned? It went rampant.”

“That’s not rampancy. It wasn’t complex enough to be rampant.”

“Given what it is, I think the term may still…”

“Quiet,” says the Director. “It’s clear to me what our next steps are.” He looks up. “Agent Maine, kindly keep any mention of this prototype to yourself. It’s nowhere near field ready and I do not need your fellow Freelancers speculating that this technology will even be tested live. You are dismissed. Doctor Asimov, I want a full copy of this data forwarded to my work terminal.”

“Do you want to head to medical?” Clark is asking. Her hand is on your arm. “Scans are coming up nominal, but a headache would be understandable.”

Stand up from the exam table and don’t answer her. Make sure you shrug her hand off, Agent Maine. Make sure you stand to your full height and stare down at her until she takes a small step back, because it’s been a few years since you woke up choking and trapped behind glass. You’re no longer desperate enough to feel grateful when a scientist pities you enough to touch you gently.

Washington, later, sitting with you in the forward lounge, says, “Carolina is everything the beta teams said she would be: you know… terrifying, but in a good way. Connecticut is nice.” Then, after a while, “Actually, she stole my soda. Can you talk her into giving it back?”

Manage a smile, Agent Maine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know your thoughts and feedback. :) It's what keeps me going.


	4. Leaderboard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The usual warnings for language and graphic depictions of violence. Feedback is much appreciated and taken to heart. Any comments you may have sincerely keep me inspired and trucking.

Connecticut may not necessarily be first notice, but she’s first to comment.

“Team roster’s up on primary.” You can hear the head tilt without looking. “That’s new.”

She says it not with any trepidation, just curiously as she passes the alert board in the mess, stopping to inspect it. Everyone is already in full armor, their helmets on table tops by their food trays like multicolored bowling balls.

Carolina glances up from her tray, triple stacked with hamburgers, and shrugs. The twins, Florida, and Wyoming ignore her. York and Washington are arguing, with earnest borderline violent intensity, about what color exactly York’s armor is. Connie stands peering at the list, glowing blue from the wall. She does this until you break her line of sight by stepping in front of the board and tapping the screen with two fingers. That dismisses the roster.  Call up the squad’s fireteam assignment, as though you don’t already know it.

Connie goes to sit with South and from the other side of the room, hear her say, “Why is it listed numerically like that?”

Luckily South Dakota is a conversationalist.

“Ball size, Agent Connecticut.” South steals the pudding cup from her teammate’s plate. Connie, who doesn’t like pudding and picked up the cup purely for South to steal, deadeyes her. South peels the lid off and licks the chocolate from the foil. “It’s true. You can tell because Carolina and Maine are at the top and they, categorically, possess the biggest sacks in this outfit. Director just wants everyone to know, first thing in the morning, who’s weighing in.”

“Agent South,” says Carolina, still devoting most of her focus to the procession of food from plate to mouth. “What did I say about the discussion of balls?”

“Not to discuss them, sir. Yes, sir. Agent Carolina, sir. I will stop discussing the size of your massive balls, sir.”

“For a bitch who loves pussy so much,” says Connie, reflectively, “you sure talk about balls a lot.”

Then she ducks when South swings at her.

The roster’s been publically available since day one in the alert board’s secondary briefing slots. It’s just not usually up on primary display. In all likelihood it’s up on the primary because the Director is going to start funneling up beta operatives. The turnover for new beta operatives is usually pretty high, you see, so it’s good to know at a glance who’s on deck.

“Fuck you,” says Washington from somewhere behind you, “you topaz motherfucker.”

You know without looking that South is biting her lip and grinning mean at Connie. Carolina, no longer reprimanding South about the discussion of ball size, is frowning at the ceiling. South and Carolina are fireteam leaders for Team Two and One respectively and tolerate the responsibility very differently. They both enforce the conversational casualness in the last free hours before they die (or don’t die) again. Freelancers are both dead and not dead in the probable future until the bullet does or doesn’t find them. Schrodinger’s fuckwits, as South puts it.

“Ugh, this waiting is killing me!” South crumples her empty pudding cup. “Just do it or don’t. Why’re they letting the infantry get torn up while we’re sitting here with our thumbs up our assholes?”

“Because COMSAT hasn’t given us a clear drop window.” Carolina drums her fingers on the table. “Navy boys need to clear out the opposition before any re-enforcements get through atmo. You wanna get shot out of the sky? Niner will love that.”

“We have a MAC. Let’s fucking MAC the opposition.”

“We have a slow-charge Mark II MAC that can’t punch a Covvie shield at spitting distance.” Connie takes a bite of her sandwich. “ _The Invention_ would get shredded if she met a real Covenant warship long enough to wink at it. Or did you think we were losing this war for fun?”

“Bullshit,” South is muttering, but her heart isn’t in it.

Connie pats her hand consolingly. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll get to kill something today.”

And this, of course, is the exact moment FILSS chimes flight confirmation over inter-comm. The theoretically dead Freelancers move to deploy and the suicide rush begins.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They say that the Covenant is winning. They have always been winning, but here is how you experience it: Humping three HAVOK nukes six miles at zero-dark under an aurora of exploding fleet ships, the glow of the incinerated wreckage lighting the earth below you. The impact and burn of a spent heatsink shelled steaming from a busted plasma rifle, the cartridge glowing red and spinning into the dark lit by tracer rounds. Climbing a trench carpeted with the dead. The smell. An empty street and a single human arm in a gutter. Your squad leader on the Pelican deck sawing off the burnt ends of her pony tail with a KABAR. Burning hair stinks like burnt flesh and you haven’t retched at the smell for years now. Project Freelancer begins to feel like Circumstance.

For the first time since joining the Freelancers, linger in the ruin of your species.

This is how you know Carolina: your lifeline. The body in the black beside you, armor camo-shelled in brown and blue. Her hand finding your shoulder between the plates of your armor, gripping, transmitting through contact a dose of adrenaline fury, pure will power. Carolina is a shot of the impossible plunging through the screaming exo-sphere of worlds lit on fire. You’d follow her into whatever howling maw she finds fit to run down.

Know this: On a long enough timeline, the odds are you’re going to fuck it up. The survival rate for the human race is on an irrevocable downturn accelerating to the speed of extinction with every passing week the war unravels through your local galaxy. In microcosm, the survival rate for the Freelancers is taking a nosedive every day into the non-stop deployment schedule.

In the Epsilon Eridani System, crouched in a missile-blasted lawn on the side of a cratered freeway on-ramp, the numbers catch up with Agent York.

York is screaming.

You’re not sure how he’s managing it with his stomach kind of ripped open like it is, but as you wedge another tube of biofoam into the massive gash across his belly, he keeps on managing. To his credit, the blast should have killed him, but a last second grab for an Elite’s energy shield and bit of luck with angles is what ultimately saved the security specialist from becoming chunks of smoking meat with the ability to scream. Despite this, a hunk of shrapnel the size of your fist and the shape of a shovel head is lodged in his stomach.

“Fuck fuck fuuuuuck!”

His hands are shaking. You can see the glistening coil of an internal organ between the lips of skin and muscle across his stomach. You shouldn’t be touching the wound. You’re covered in alien blood and that can’t be sanitary. Momentarily wonder if Sangheili blood is toxic. You don’t recollect ever being told such a thing, however, so you pull another bio-foam pen from your IFAK and use it on the locksmith who screams as the chemicals burn and seal over. He grabs fistfuls of the grass underneath him, ripping up the turf until the spasm passes and he lies still, panting.

“What,” says York, finding the sanity to complain, “is the point of these fucking armor mods if they don’t… fucking work… without a fucking internet connection?”

In an alternate universe, where Freelancer equipment load-outs are functional, York’s experimental medical mod works. It links back to the MoI command server and the armor’s on-board smart-surgery suite knits York’s perforated stomach back together. But that’s in a theoretical world based on perfect orbital transmission vectors and no Covenant communication jams. In this world, York can’t get a link so he coughs blood while you carry him, balled around his ripped abdomen, to the extraction point off this shitty moon.

Later, in the loading bay of _the Invention_ as York is wheeled to medical, Carolina says, “He’ll get it working.” She’s got a gash in her cheek, crusted and scraped, bleeding sluggish. She stinks like plasma fumes, like a fresh battlefield. When you stare wordlessly down at her she says, “The armor mods. The Director will figure out a way to get them linked. I’m assured of this.”

You think maybe Freelancer is her first go at being any kind of NCO, the way she keeps quoting back the Director’s promises to you, like she’s never had a CO fuck her over in the field and teach her the taste of bullshit. Or like she’s been fucked over many times and knows it’s not necessarily morale-juicing to go around talking shit about the higher ups. Either way, suppose she says it to you because she knows you won’t argue the point. Hazard an infinitesimal possibility that Agent Carolina just wants to convince herself.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The dying starts with Indiana.

The Director cycles in members from the beta squads, all Freelancer operatives rallying back to the Mother of Invention before disappearing immediately into the ether of planet-side combat. Indiana is the first to cycle up into Alpha’s Squad’s remaining free slot. Twenty minutes into the mission, seventy-two hours into what is (for you) a non-stop planetside deployment, North Dakota takes a needler round through the front of his helmet. It punches through the visor at a downward angle through his cheek and lodges between his teeth like an oversized lollipop. Nearly severs his tongue from the inside of his jaw, splits three molars to the nerves.

So just like that the Twins aren’t there to back Indiana like they’re supposed to.

South reroutes you to back Indiana and you reach her fast, incredibly fast, you get to her defense. You’re one-hundred meters out from her, three grenades in your rifle, two mags left to burn, your body a fucking inferno of lactic acids and stimulants. You’re a living Molotov cocktail, throbbing blood and pain and technology. Fifty meters out from her, she sees you coming and turns toward you, rifle in hand. For a moment: you made it. Everything is fine.

Then the second Covenant drop ship swings out of the dust-blackened sky. It slices an insectoid arc to hover directly over your teammate and as the dust churns beneath its turbines, the alien ship opens its belly and drops fifteen bristling vultures. Indiana, for the half second before they hit, manages to shoot down two of them.

Then the Jackal infantry rips her limb from limb. It takes them four seconds to pull her into six spraying pieces. The last you see of Indiana through the scope is a vulture-faced King-Yar lieutenant, digging into the neck of her helmet and pulling the head from the hole. Remember it: the pendulum swing, the weight of her skull on a rattail of grey spinal column, the candy yellow barrettes in her hair –

Washington shakes you awake.

“Ready?” He tilts his head. The Pelican running lights shift across the gold of his visor. You’re sitting in the back of Fatass, Washington standing over you, clearly having just boarded. His armor is unmarked. Fresh out of processing. Reorient, Maine. Washington says, “We’re oscar mike. Gonna brief on the way out. Boss is headed up.”

Glance down. There’s still blood on the Pelican floor beneath your boots. North’s. Four-Seven-Niner didn’t hose it out. Usually, she hoses it out between missions. Washington doesn’t notice the blood. The insides of Pelicans aren’t clean in his world. What is clean to a helljumper? His kind hose the pureed dead out of Pelicans, then sit in the sluice left over. He glances around.

“Did you sleep in here?”

“Probably.” Carolina is climbing up the loading ramp into the cargo bay. She slings a rucksack the size of a body bag to the floor and starts going through it. She shoves a bandolier of short-burst frag grenades at Washington without looking up. “He always sleeps while we’re en route. Help me rack the rest of this, Washington.”

“Hey, did we get cleared for the heavy arms drop?”

“Wash, I’m top of that leaderboard for a reason.” She lets the cloud of smug hang like that for just a moment, then, “That said, I redirected half the M41s to Wyoming and Florida.” When Wash makes a small ‘mmm’ sound of disappointment she deadpans, “We can do more with less, Agent. We don’t horde equipment.”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

Carolina lets Washington finish unloading and bends down to eye level with you.

“North’s in recovery. All green on mission objectives. Can you walk off Indiana?” Inhale. Your mouth is gluey and the stale stink of your own breath inside the helmet is rank. For a moment, something ruptures in you, the premonition of your own demise flowers black and takes root, splitting you open to a soundtrack of Indiana screaming.  Carolina touches your shoulder, hand on the armor. The chaos settles inside you. “Go back to sleep. It’ll be a five hour ETA to planetside. I’ll wake you up.”

Exhale. “Okay.”

She uses her palm to wipe a smear from your chest plate. Blood or dirt. She thumbs something off the side of your visor and inspects it, briefly, flicking it away before you can take a look. Then she slaps the side of your helmet and stands up. The impact wakes you. It wakes you.

“You’re good, Maine. Stay with me.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Agent L.

It’s not another Freelancer. It’s a joke. Well, no. It’s not a joke.  It’s a reference to Agent Orange, the chemical herbicide dropped on 4 million Vietnamese from 1961 to 1971 during the Vietnam War. South told you about it. You don’t know how South knows this kind of stuff but she tells you because it wasn’t covered in your limited and half-forgotten military education. Agent L is not an herbicide. Agent L is the newest in Insurrectionist chemical warfare and in the clusterfuck of human extinction it’s unfathomable that humanity is poisoning itself to a faster obliteration.

South Dakota vomits in the Pelican. Coughs. Retches again and falls against the seats. You listen to South vomit up bits of her stomach lining for a few minutes more. Her helmet cracked in a chemical environment and there’s nothing you can do except hope she didn’t get a lethal dose of the gas that’s been ghosting the civilian populace of the nearby colonial postings along this sector.

You and she were pulled from a neighboring Covenant recon op for this.

To stop humanity killing itself on the sidelines.

“Tell me we’re withdrawing,” South says to Four-Seven-Niner. She coughs blood and gasps. “I don’t care if you’re lying. Tell me we’re going back to _the Invention_.”

“Sorry, Dipdye.” Niner doesn’t look away from the front of the cockpit. “There’s water by the weapon locker up front. It’s four hours out to the next drop. We rendezvous with Wyoming and Carolina and we’re back on the fucking Covvies.” She turns on some music upfront. “Keep it together, guys. This ride doesn’t stop until it does.”

South is dunking her head in a dirty ice cooler someone put in the back of the Pelican. She chucks a water bottle and a Pepsi can from the inside and dunks again. The Pepsi rolls against your boot. She retches and retches and the sound is rubber tubes getting yanked out of your guts to you. When she stops retching she sits curled over the cooler, hair plastered translucent to her skull. Hers eyes are bloodshot, the skin inflamed in the socket. Her nose won’t stop bleeding, the insides of her nostrils seared and cracked open by chemical fumes.

“That shit was ours you know.”

When South doesn’t immediately give you context for her comment, exhaustion circles like a noose. But before you can slide under she says, “The shit the Innies dropped. The shit we couldn’t stop them from dropping before we smoked ‘em. That shit.” Her grin is ragged, a knifecut sliced into her cheek. She licks blood and spits it. “That’s UNSC shit. We used to drop that on Innies back in the day.” She grins and her teeth are pink lined in red. “We denied it, but that was us. We made it. We dropped it. Now they’re dropping it on us.”

She laughs. Coughs again. Dry heaves and heaves then slams a fist into the wall.

“Fuck them! They couldn’t wait to fuck us back until the war was over!? Stupid Innie stumpfucks!”

Thirty minutes ago, South Dakota drove a Humvee loaded with C4 into the Insurrectionist storage depot. Ignited everyone and everything inside. Objective green. Close your eyes. Do not imagine the bodies in the street – boiled red, skin cracked open like old paint, bleeding black. The last thing you hear as you’re going down, yanked violent into the black sea of unconsciousness, is South muttering to herself:

“He better bump me up the board for this.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Director assigns you to a third mission in as many days and Carolina, in the War Room, interrupts him.

“Sir,” she says, slowly, very slowly. No one has been to armor processing yet, so she’s still covered in blood. The blood in question is brown, not black, after drying. Human blood. She’s got her helmet under her arm. There’s a bruise the size of an egg below her right eye. “Tactically, sir, for a mission of this scale we should be deploying with the full team. One Pelican and three Agents to clear an entire Covenant armor convoy is –”

“Completely sufficient, Agent.” The Director regards her calmly. “And, frankly, I’m not hearing the aggressiveness expected from operatives in this outfit.”

Carolina opens her mouth, a reflex. Recognize the shape of the syllables behind her teeth for what they were going to be before she closes her mouth. She must roll her phrasing across her tongue and reshape it because she says, eventually, “Yes, sir. But Maine’s been on hard runs for two weeks now. Ten beta operatives are down with nervous fatigue. Shouldn’t we –?”

“Agent, we do not have time to push back this mission. Every moment is lives lost. As to the assignment of Agent Maine to your roster, are you presuming to speak for Agent Maine or has he expressed that he is no longer combat ready and needs to be removed from active deployment?” The Director looks at you, bypassing Agent Carolina. “You’ve been silent this entire briefing, Agent Maine. Do you feel you can still do your duty or will I need to send your fellow agents on their own?”

Washington, startled at the possibility of being deployed with one man less, glances at you. His eyes are red from chems and battle stims. He looks like shit, but you’re already shaking your head. You’re fucking tired and you want to get some shut eye before the Pelican is ready to leave. Carolina does not refute your claim of combat readiness, but in the corridor you can hear Washington speaking to her, sidelong, in a lowered voice.

“Boss, if the Director slots him for another deployment –”

“He won’t. After five missions, he’ll pull Maine for mission leave and medical. I am assured of this.”

“All due respect, but we were ‘assured of this’ last time.”

“Well, I’m assured of it this time too, Wash.”

“Sixth time’s a charm.”

Carolina looks at him and he shuts up.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Hawaii dies because he fucks up.

To be more specific, he dies because he falls two kilometers from the top of a fucking mountain and the planet’s gravity, about ten pounds heavier than Earth standard, breaks him open like a meaty water balloon against the rocks.

It happens like this: You and Hawaii blow a hole in a Covenant mountain-side weapon depot then run like hell for the edge of said mountain. Fifty feet beyond the cliff edge is the evac Pelican, hovering like a fat steel humming bird, the back of the cargo hold hung open – as close as the aircraft can physically get without ramming up against the cliff in violent winds. Hawaii has two-hundred meters to power up to speed, two-hundred meters to plot his jump and momentum. You hit the loading ramp going nearly 20mph, the force of the jump powering you with a bang into a crouch against the floor.

You realize Hawaii didn’t make it only when you don’t feel him hit the ramp beside you.  

Note: it takes Hawaii 30 seconds to hit the ground. Testament to the technology, the armor survives the impact better than the body inside it, so the inter-team COMFreq clearly transmits the sound Hawaii makes when his skull – and everything else – explodes inside the suit. Testament to Hawaii’s resolve – he doesn’t scream when he falls. He just says, softly, like he’s disappointed in himself, “fuck” before he hits the ground.

Niner starts shouting at you.

“It was only fifty feet! What the fuck? What the fuck? He only had to jump fifty goddamn feet!” She closes the loading ramp, swings the Pelican out toward the dark bowl of the sky. “The stupid fuck. I mean, it was only fifty feet. Jesus fucking Christ. There wasn’t even anyone shooting at him for Christ’s sake! There wasn’t even anyone shooting at you!”

Don’t answer her. Just lie down on the floor of her Pelican. Hook your fingers into the dirty grating and squeeze until the metal cross-sections dig red lines into the creases of your fingers. Close your eyes. When you sleep, dream of lying on the floor of the same Pelican and in this heaven Carolina crouches, grinning, over you and says it’s ten hours out to the next objective and you have time to sleep. A whole ten hours to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Oklahoma’s death, arguably, is the worst.

Before he dies, he loans you a digital copy of a few translated novels about the culture of hyper cyberization and the synthetic epoch in Japan. He does this despite the fact he hasn’t slept in 48-hours and lost half his beta squad fireteam during his last op. He has a personal interest in cyberization. Oklahoma, born and raised in firmware nexus Tokyo, is a cyborg. Both of his legs are both war-grade synthetics from mid-thigh down.

An Insurrection-backed para-military resistance crops up on a hub moon in the Eridanus system. An otherwise unremarkable chunk of rock, this moon had been overlooked as a primary link in the UNSC supply chain until the Insurrection kills the local civilian personnel and takes control of the transport terminal and, more importantly, the moon’s anti-air defense grid. This they use to gun down USNC vessels. Four hundred hands dead in the initial salvo. Freelancer is deployed to neutralize the threat on the ground so UNSC relief troops can get through

Oklahoma, in a ground team with you and Wyoming, is gunned down by an auto-turret while infiltrating the top story of the command tower. The turret blows his right leg off from the knee down, clipping his left leg at the calf and knocking its insides apart. This leaves him alive, but elbow-crawling down a stairwell – Wyoming telling him over and over to just get out of sight, to just find cover, to just hold tight – when the Insurrectionist security forces find him.

He is still alive when they manage to re-activate his inter-team COMFreq so you and Wyoming are privy when the Insurrectionists rule him guilty of war crimes and collaboration with enemies of Allied People’s Liberation Force then sentence him to death. They then shoot him four times and push him off a fifty foot catwalk where he comes up ten feet short of the ground on the end of a noose. The snap transmits through radio.

They are unaware that, on Oklahoma’s body, is an orbital transmitter linking back the ship’s MAC targeting system and, while he was being murdered, Oklahoma flipped it active.

COMSAT immediately clears a strike on the transport control tower, but when _the Invention_ puts a 600-ton ferric-tungsten round of fiery malcontent and terminal velocity straight through the top of the tower – cratering the structure like a house of cards and vaporizing Oklahoma’s killers – you’re already asleep three miles away waiting for the evac Pelican. When you wake up, catch Wyoming trying to put out his cigarette on your armor.

“You missed it,” he says.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Sir, with respect, squad three needs the server connection. If _the Invention_ can only maintain a single stable ship-to-suit link in the field, then I think it should be me. Agent Carolina said it was fine with her if it was reallocated to my squad.”

Try not to vomit, Maine. You’ve been meaning to for the last fifteen minutes but force swallowing your own puke is something you’ve mastered in the last twenty-four hours. Alternatively, you could remove your helmet and retch on the Director’s neat, gridded, touch-interface command table. He might not like that. You are so fucking unfathomably soul-crushingly high and exhausted and high from being exhausted that you start to laugh. Don’t do that. It triggers your gag reflex, see, so choke back the taste like rot and fermented lemon and try not to make any noise. Fantasize about passing out in the Pelican again. Obsess about oblivion.

On the other end of the command table, the Director is talking.

“Agent Connecticut, are you or are you not capable of running your mod in the field without a server uplink?”

“I am, sir, but we would benefit from a greater effect from the holo-mod. Carolina said –”

“Carolina is not in command.” He says it like he’s mentioning the weather – curiously but not with any real investment. He’s keying something into the holo-table as he speaks. “She may be inclined to give up resources I allocated to her, but her objectives supersede yours. So, the server uplink will remain with her fireteam.”

“Sir, if her team isn’t going to utilize the uplink, doesn’t it make more sense to reallocate?”

“Connecticut, I thought I made my decision remarkably clear. If you are having trouble understanding, perhaps you should be relieved as squad leader.”

Connecticut freezes for just an instant. She glances at you for some reason.

Behind her the roster is up on the wall, blue and white LED display, haloing her into a silhouette that you can’t read. Don’t look at her any particular way, do not transmit through some silence or frequency that you’re dying where you stand, that sleep’s been stalking you for weeks and ripping you apart in minutes of stolen REM. She is fighting for the squad, for equipment, for something intangible as a clear chain of command unfucked by a civilian authority. You are trying to gauge if you’re tasting blood in the acid phlegm burning the back of your throat.

She turns back to the Director. “Understood, sir.”

Hold it together until your squad reaches the air hangar. When your boots hit the tarmac, yank off your helmet and double up retching. Puke until you dry heave and your eyes burn and your nostrils clog and sting. Cough. Gag. Shake it off. Gauge the shake in your hands and queue another field stim just in time for the onboard medi-suite to chime empty. Stare for a moment at the watery yellow contents of your own stomach, swaying slightly, until someone touches your arm.

“You don’t look so great, buddy.”

Pull away from Florida and board the Pelican. There’s still blood on the floor. It stinks inside. When you take a weighty seat in the passenger bay, sprawling there, Florida follows you and moves to stand with his boots planted between yours. He stands over you like that for a moment, like he’s waiting for a reaction, but you’re already closing your eyes. When Florida gently shakes you, just seconds later, jolt up from the deep instant REM that took you. Resist the urge to punch Florida in the balls.

“Hold on. You should probably drink something. You’re dehydrated.” He’s holding out a canteen. “Triple oxidized. Rinse. Spit. Then drink.”

You’re too tired to resent Florida so you do what he says.

“Bio-comm says you’re out of in-suit stims. Need a pick me up?”

Too tired. Just nod.

“Want me --?” Florida pantomimes stabbing himself in the neck with the stim-pen.

Lift your chin and turn your head as consent. Florida makes no comment while he deftly tugs the stiff collar of the under-suit down slightly and presses the rounded end of the pen into the flesh over your jugular. The bite of the hypo is nothing. A pinch. Shudder slightly at the rush of warmth and dull euphoria. Makes you light headed. Feel the vague stir of an erection – physiological and uncommitted. Kinda feels good. Mostly, you still want to puke. Takes you a second to register Florida’s stance is a little wider than it was a moment ago. The outer edge of his boots are set against the inner curve of yours, keeping your knees where they are.

“You’re fourth on the board. Connie-girl is third. Think that will change soon?”

Truth: you had no goddamn idea the Director was moving people around on the board or, more importantly, that his doing so meant anything. Some part of your concussed consciousness twitches in protest, like a poked nerve, but when every fiber of your existence is raw nerve, you no longer possess the objectivity needed to gauge the wrongness of this information. That the Director is moving people on a board.

“Never mind. Sleep tight, Agent Maine.”

Florida says it fondly. Then – as though to abort your anxiety about Connecticut with new and more exciting anxieties – he leans down and kisses you on the mouth. Freeze. His index finger is against the line of your jaw, tilting it up. His skin smells faintly like salt, and aftershave. He breathes out against your blood-cracked lips.

Before you unfreeze, he stops kissing you and walks out of the Pelican. For a whole second, wonder if you hallucinated that. Then wipe your mouth with the back of your filthy glove. The Kevlar composite micro-fibers scrape your lips raw and when that’s done do it again. Lick the blood away. You’re too fucking tired. You’re too goddamn strung out and fucked up to care about Florida’s social slights of hand in the middle of humanity’s last war. Be 99% sure he’s just fucking with you for the thrill of it. Or he’s as psychotic and sleep deprived as you and his coping mechanism is just as inscrutable as the assassin himself.

Close your eyes and –

 

 

* * *

 

 

Two months, and eighteen deployments later, you think you’re going insane.

This thought comes on the battlefield. You’re fetched up behind a low wall while, in the distance, the roar of approaching Elites grows louder. It’s been a week since you slept more than two hours at a time and it’s been a month since you haven’t been doped on some kind of stim to keep you moving. You’re not moving now though. And no kind of stim is going to get you moving without effort.

“Maine, you need to move.”

Carolina in your ear. Carolina always in your ear. You could twist your fingers into her voice like a Kevlar cord – lashing you to the real world where you have to get the fuck up. Right now.

“If you don’t move they’re going to find you and I can’t help you if they find you there. Get up, Agent Maine.”

The skeleton of the space station around you is buzzing and buzzing into your bones, tuning you up to some climax. You’re fetched up against a wall in a lower section of a hangar bay, blown and burned out and only mostly empty of Covenant ground forces who are in too much of a hurry to notice you curled around your wounds behind a stack of alien equipment. The cylindrical objects stacked beside you are big as coffins and pulse menacingly.

You need to move.

The right side of your helmet is pulverized, smashed in, the face-shield cracked so severely the HUD keeps snowing out. Queue another medical override, strong arm your suit into a fourth dose of field chems, flooding your blood with adrenaline and painkiller and focus, Maine, focus, focus, focus for the three seconds of nausea, riding out the dizzy jag in your gut and the feeling going out of fingers which is superior by far than feeling the three that are broken, the bones grinding and lighting up your arm from the elbow down in a white phosphorus flash of pain.

Ignore the extreme crush of heat cutting into the side of your skull, the smashed shell of your helmet driven inward, piercing through the padding and into the cartilage of your right ear. Suspect that the only thing holding that side of your head together is the helmet. The inside was filling will blood so you unsealed the jaw to let it drain from your chin down the neck of your drive suit.

In the haze: Carolina’s voice ringing clear down the cochlear nerve, as though she is in your skull and not your radio, saying, “Move right fucking now. We are on your nine, Maine! You have ten seconds to get your ass to me! So move!”

Moving is hard with a bullet in your hip. Move anyway.

Explode from your crouched position and as you uncoil into your dead-out run, so too does the pain uncoil and unravel barbed wire into your entire lower body. Power through it. Run and ignore the red hot surge that rips through your pelvis, the sheik of pain so intense you bite through part of your tongue to distract yourself from the ball-crushing grind. Make yourself sprint the last hundred meters between you and the evac Pelican. Breach this threshold of agony and plane out, briefly, into euphoric numb as your nerves short and your brain cannot process. The corners of your vision are black and the hanging mouth of the loading ramp blurs violently, snaps back into focus, the fucking center of the world.

You can’t jump the three-foot vertical gap between the bottom of the ramp and the pavement so just kind of collide with it, hands first, using the momentum as a fulcrum to vault your armored frame up onto the platform, crashing and rolling aboard. You hear the crack of a BR55HB SR Battle Rifle. Washington calmly firing burst after burst from the top of the ramp.

“Maine is onboard! Carolina, where are –?”

Carolina hits the loading ramp next to you like an armored mountain lion, shouting, “Niner, go go go!”

There’s ten seconds where Carolina must get her arm under yours, or maybe she just grabs you by the wrist and drags your dead weight to the floor of the Pelican. Come back when she tries, gently, to remove your helmet and your elbow whips back, smashing into her ribs. She grunts, hooks your arm, trapping it under her armpit.

“Maine!”

“Don’t take it off!” Washington’s voice. “It’s the only thing holding his skull together, for fucks sake.”

“Washington. Focus. The charges? Can you blow them or not?”

“No way. We are danger close to the fucking HAVOK nukes or is that not a thing in this outfit? I’m not pulling until we break outer atmo –!”

Niner, from the front of the Pelican, shouts, “Blow the fucking nukes!”

The ship jars, knocking Washington into the wall and Carolina down on top of you, her hands on either side of you, pinning your weight in place as the Pelican roars. She’s black with blood – the oxidized gore of dead Covenant species slicking her like the quick slide of her camo-tech, colors her dark. She hisses, wipes the blood pooling in the hollow of your collarbone, fingers sliding, searching for a wound before she realizes it’s all coming from inside your helmet.

The ship rattles again and Carolina shouts, “The goddamn anti-air is gonna make that not a fucking issue, Agent Washington! Are you sure you can’t set them off?”

“Yes! Fuck. I don’t –!” The ship lurches hard, something bashes against the outer hull. Harried, he bellows, “Get us at least to upper atmosphere! We might have a chance up there!”

“Washington, are you sure?”

“You told me to do my job! I’m doing it! I know the fucking payload, so I know the fucking minimum distance not to be dead and this isn’t it!”

Carolina’s hand on your chest tenses, then is gone. You can hear her up at the front of the Pelican with Four-Seven-Niner, likely in the co-pilot seat helping get them to the magic minimum. You can hear Niner saying something like “fucking cock-bite motherfuckers!” The tin-box shell of the Pelican rattles violent as it punches up through the planet’s gravity well, through the atmosphere. Four-Seven-Niner calls Wash a ‘fucking dick suck’ and Carolina shouts, “Wash! We’re clear! Detonate the payload!”

You don’t have to see him to recognize the three-fold click of the detonator tablet. You know the dull plastic snap of the trigger like you know the assemblage of an M6E handgun. There is a three second delay and Washington sets off a daisy chain much larger than the one Ohio did. Know this: Washington pulls the trigger and kills more Covenant soldiers than you have in all your years of service. (Three years of service, Agent Maine.) He ignites the moon below in five places, cracks it open like a marble under a hammer. You’re already in space, so there’s no sound, but on the ground is a scream of the atom cracking open five times over. You don’t even feel the shockwave.

Washington’s voice reaches you, eventually, saying, “We’re going home, buddy. Just hang on.”

And even further away, Carolina on the radio saying, “Director? Objective complete. The target is destroyed. Relaying priority confirmation to UNSC Command. They are cleared for inter-sector jump and clean up. Uploading basic ship scans, but it looks like at least a 90% loss of dry-docked Covvie ships. We have wounded and are inbound priority one. It’s Maine.” And then, quieter. “He can’t do it. Yes. Yes, I’m sure.” Then, “I think his damn skull is cracked, sir. I will take his spot on the goddamn roster. Why are you asking about –?”

Don’t think about it. About your brain hemorrhaging, cerebral spinal fluids dripping down the back of your throat. Think about getting to the next minute and the next. Think of every minute for the next forty minutes, which is how long it takes them to get you to _the Invention_ where the Director – finally, after three weeks, eighteen deployments and non-lethal trips to medical, seven bullets, innumerable wounds – pulls you from the active duty roster.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Anyway, Kohl still has the cat. She sent me pictures. Do you want to see pictures of our stupid fucking cat, boss?”

“Agent Washington, if you show me pictures of cats, I’m going to break your other arm.”

“It’s just one cat. Well, two, Kohl adopted another one, but the ugly one is the important one. That cat’s survived some shit.” There’s a long silence, followed by the sound of boots scuffing the floor. “I was just thinking I haven’t shown Maine the picture of this stupid fucking cat and Maine would love it if he weren’t in a goddamn coma.”

“It’s a medically induced coma and he should be coming out of it shortly. Doc’s orders.  Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Sorry boss, when someone says ‘coma’ I don’t really fuss the nuances.”

“He’s going to be fine.”

“Yeah, yeah. Everyone got blown up. Maine’s been comatose for a month. Covenant is trying to kill humanity, but, hey, COMSAT pulled us off the front lines, so we’re all fine.”

“Wash. Are you –?”

“Did I tell you,” Wash says, loudly, “I’m actually a dog person? Like, I fucking love dogs. Dogs are great. They come when you call. You can pet ‘em all over. And I like big dogs you know? Like huge fucking dogs you can, like, wrestle with and knock you over when they jump on you. Dogs are loyal and fun and stupid and they like you just because you’re standing there.”

Carolina doesn’t say anything, but her silence has a face. That face she gets when she knows she can’t say anything to make an agent feel better so she’s just going to listen to them vent.

“When the war is over,” says Washington, still unnaturally loud, “I’m gonna get a dog and every day I’m gonna go play in the park with that dog. Throw Frisbees for it. I always wanted a dog that would chase Frisbees, like in the movies. People with big happy dogs always look so fucking happy on TV so I’m gonna get a big happy dog and buy twenty Frisbees. How about you, Maine? Dogs or cats?”

Then, because it seems the time, say, roughly, “Cats.”

Washington slams an elbow into something. “OW! Shit! Holy _fuck_ , you’re awake.”

A hand briefly rests on your arm, then withdraws. Carolina’s from the slenderness in the fingers and the roughness of the palm, from the way she instinctively touched then remembered you don’t like that. Crack one eye open. Your squad leader is leaning over you on one side, her hair knotted military tight in the back, gone Freelancer awry in the front. One of her eyes is blocked by candy red bangs. Washington has bedhead, a massive line of stitching across the underside of his jawline, and his left arm in a sling. You can see the whites all around in his eyes.

“You took quite the hit,” says Carolina. Her voice is an elbow in the ribs during a funeral. “Don’t worry. Your good looks aren’t even remotely ruined, agent.”

“She’s lying. You’re hideous,” says Wash.

Reach up and shove his face out of yours. The movement sends an instant roll of pain terminating out from the ligaments in your shoulder, lighting up the previously muted network of nerves to pins and needles and ache. Through the haze you can still feel your squaddie’s shit-eating grin against the crease in your palm. So: worth it. Carolina takes a seat on the edge of your medical cot, knitting her fingers in her lap. Her eyes are bruised. It’s the worst you’ve seen her and you’ve seen her with a bullet in one collapsed lung before. Lift a finger to jab it at the bruising. Cock an interrogative brow.

“Just because you go and get yourself blown up doesn’t mean I get to sit on my ass. Had to pick up your slack.”

She’s smiling, but she’s not joking.

“Yeah, jeez, Maine.” Washington has resumed his shit-grinning at you. “Pull your sizable weight why don’t you?”

Flip him off.

“Wash, you should get Connecticut. She wanted to know when he woke up.”

He gives her a little salute as he jogs for the door. “On it, boss. Maine, glad you’re not a in a coma. I’ve got cat pictures to show you while you can’t get away. Be right back.”

Carolina watches him go, her brows lilting ceilingward, before turning back to look at you. She grins, folds her hands together on top of the knee she’s got curled up onto the bed next to you. Note the bruises, her paleness, the slight gauntness in her face. What she’s got on is a tired grin. A soul-fucked grin. A relieved grin.

She purses her lips a moment, then says, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Wow, and here I thought you couldn’t possibly sound any goddamn worse.”

Flip her off too.

“We didn’t lose anyone from Alpha.” She says that clearly, definitively. Something tight in your belly, a tension you were previously unaware of, unwinds. “COMSAT had _the Invention_ and the other support ships pull out of the system. Earth’s safe for now, I guess. We’re back to selective ops.” She shores up her grin a bit. “Your boy Washington is pulling his weight. Did some real good demo work after you went down. You would have been proud of the carnage, cat pictures or not.”

You can’t articulate that it’s best not to let it go to the little bastard’s head, so just sneer, unimpressed.

“Hey, that last mission we – the Director says it broke the line. The dockyard losses turned the fight around in that system. That stopped the advance. Us. Project Freelancer.” She smirks. “Not a SPARTAN in sight.”

A small twinge of guilt, but a small one.

Carolina continues to smirk, but offers a hand, face up. You can see where callouses in her palm have torn open. Where her knuckles have become scar tissue. Her hands look like yours in smaller dimension so what else can you do but loop your fingers around her palm and grasp her hand like a roll bar? Her grip vices pressure into the bones of your hand until you can feel your pulse in her fingers. Or maybe it’s her pulse. She smiles a little harder.

“Get better. Team misses you in a fight, Freelancer.”

Give her a grin, then with your free hand reach around and pull the elastic out of her ponytail. She could have avoided you, but she doesn’t. She lets you use two hands to aim the stretched hair tie at her, the band straining like a slingshot between the pad of your thumb and the forefinger. Aim laconically while she deadeyes you.

“What are you twelve?”

Snap the band at her.

“Okay, that coma was clearly an extended naptime for you, because now you’re all feisty.” She recovers the tie and neatly loops her hair back into formation. “I’ll leave you to Washington and his cat pictures.”

“Monster.”

“Eat a dick, Agent Maine.”

And then, for a moment, you’re alone.

The EKG machine blips softly. Take stock of your injuries – move your fingers over the side of your head. Run the pad of your index finger gently along the outer curve of your ear, your thumb across the soft tab of the lobe. No sign of the concussion round that crunched your helmet in, driving portions of it into the bones of your skull, shredding cartilage from your head. You can’t even feel a seam. Where the bullet punched into your pelvis, find only a slight pucker under the heavy cotton of your pants. The history of violence smoothed away.

Map it out – the scars. It’s been a long time and you have time now so run fingertips into the tracks of discoloration and scar tissue, the ghost of surgeries running the length of your bare forearm. The scar on your belly, the entry point for the meter of metal that ripped you through and through, is a pale line the width of four fingers, smooth as a redacted sentence on paper. The old scars have the same ugly texture they’ve had since your waking.

So then what narrative can you transcribe from the keloid Braille beneath your fingers? The wounds they inflicted on you – how much more grievous must they have been? How much deeper? They were, after all, in the end, fatal wounds. Why didn’t they heal them? Why didn’t they wipe the evidence from your skin?

It takes you a moment to register that you hear voices. They must be in the hall outside, speaking in restrained, lowered tones because even to you it comes in and out. Despite this, know the speakers are Washington and Connecticut. Sit up slightly and focus. Listen.

“– not talking about this again.”

“We talked last time?”

“Connie I don’t –” Inaudible mumbles. “—just woke up for fuck’s sake.”

“My point exactly.”

Your legs ache. When you swing your feet to the floor, the tile sweats cold. Your blood throbs through you like it’s gained density, like you’ve been working out for days, every pound of weight pulling on your bones. From the bed to the door is miles. When you get there, tip your forehead against the cool metal of the door frame, the cold radiating into your aching head. From here, you can hear everything.

“Are you seriously talking about the leaderboard right now?” Washington’s voice spikes high, almost cracking with disbelief. “Connie, we’ve been through this: the beta squads had a roster like that too. It existed to let us know which squad members were most likely to get bumped to Alpha. That’s all. Didn’t affect command structure. It’s not like the Director’s dumb enough to make a pissing contest out of COC.”

A thwapping sound, like Connie either grabbed his shoulder or smacked him in the chest. “This isn’t the beta squads, Washington. And it may not affect chain of command directly but it sure as fuck is qualifying something. It sure as hell shows who gets time, manpower, and equipment. Or have you not noticed who gets told to fuck themselves when the supply load outs come around?”

“The boss is an asshole who misallocates resources and plays favorites. Welcome to my entire military career. Why are you getting so worked up about this?”

“Because Carolina is at the top of the board and you say the numbers don’t matter. I’m saying not everyone is going to passively not see a correlation.”

“No one thinks like that. No one is going to start mouthing off at Carolina, even if she dropped a rank. Not that she will, mind you, because the woman is a fucking machine. Maine was number two on that board for a while. Director didn’t give him a fireteam.”

“Carolina is the closest thing we have to an NCO. We’re supposed to trust her but the Director is undercutting her decisions. He didn’t used to do that. He knew to let her lead. Now he’s micromanaging and it’s based on that stupid board. Half of the missions we run – I’m not even sure what chain of command they’re getting back to, because it’s not regular UNSC.”

“Wait. Are you back checking our mission logs against Command records?”

“We’re so isolated out here, we don’t know if anything he’s saying about our deployments is even true and –”

“It’s not our job to care about that crap, CT. We know what we need to know. What’s your problem? This is what you’re thinking about instead of the mission? Fuck, Connie. Do you think maybe this is why I got a faceful of shrapnel in that last jump? Because you’re too busy thinking about this shit instead of --”

He stops but it’s too late. You’ve stopped breathing. When did you start holding your breath? You can see their faces without seeing them: Connie’s blank expression, her eyes too wide and focused – looking at Washington with a stare that cuts his words in half. Picture Washington’s grimace – genuine regret and embarrassment, a touch of panic. He likes Connecticut. Of everyone on the team that isn’t you, he likes her the most.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes you did. Tell Maine I’ll see him later. You should stay with him.”

“Connie…”

“No. Just looking at him makes me so angry I can taste it. But I guess it doesn’t bother you he was in a coma for weeks with his head half crushed because the Director is running more ops than we’re cleared for. Do you even understand what Maine’s position is on this team?”

“I understand that we’re at _war_. Maybe that means something else for secret squirrel RTOs like you, but for me that just means fight until you can’t. And Maine? What he did out there, what Carolina, and Niner and I did out there stopped the goddamn Covies dead in this sector and that’s real. That’s _everything_ , Connie.” He’s not hostile when he says it. He’s pleading. “Who fucking cares how the Director gets it done. It’s done isn’t it? Aren’t we doing some fucking good?”

A silence.

“Maybe.” You almost can’t hear her she says it so soft. “Maybe you’re right, Wash.”

“Come see Maine.”

“I’ll see him later. If he’s awake, they’ll release him to barracks soon.”

“Connie.”

“I will see him. Give him my love for now.”

And in a completely sincere and weighty tone Wash says, “Sexual or platonic?”

Connie snorts. “Shut the fuck up.”

As it turns out, Connecticut is slotted for another deployment later that night and will be gone for a 48 hours. So she does not, as it turns out, come to see you later. Unless, of course, by ‘later’ that was the timeframe she meant – days after battle.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Agent South Dakota rock music makes her extremely unpopular with anyone who wants to sleep at regular hours. Not, mind you, that popularity has ever been a primary concern of Agent South Dakota. That said, two years at war did not afford you the time to develop a prejudice to 21st century riot grrrl punk rock. Even at 3AM. The music wakes you because your door is open slightly. Blink awake. Your first thought upon hearing the lyrics to Rebel Girl at 4AM should probably not be, Oh, good, South’s back in one piece, but that’s precisely it. Lie there for a moment listening to the voice from the hall, saying over and over again, _Rebel girl, Rebel girl! Rebel girl you are the queen of my world! Rebel girl, rebel girl…_

South’s music is, by nature, extremely loud.

After about five minutes listening to it, get out of bed and lean into the hall.

Four doors down from you, South’s door is open, throwing a long band of yellow across the floor to the opposite wall and, through the heavy spike and rail of extended guitar solos, you can hear a man laughing and a metal buzzing. The floors under your bare feet are cold, the steel doorframe under your hand chill when you come to lean around the corner and look inside.

South is sitting on a crate in a pair of fatigues and a sports bra. Florida is sitting backwards in a chair with his bare back to her, his shirt pulled up over his head and under his chin. He blinks at you. South ignores you. Her focus is patient and singular on the space between Florida’s shoulder blades where she is in the process of tattooing a bright shade of red into the eye of what appears to be a stylized Jackal skull. The room stinks of Lucky Strikes. You know the smell from the foxholes on Circumstance and Connie’s hair when she visits your rack.

The buzz is the tattoo machine.

“Hey, Maine.” South speaks through her teeth, carefully, so her cigarette wobbles on her lips but does not fall. She wipes blood away – dark red on the fired clay color of Florida’s skin. Florida holds his hand over his shoulder and she stops long enough to pick the Lucky Strike from her mouth and fit it between his fingers. Florida winks at you, takes a drag. South continues what she’s doing. “Heard they let you out. You look good for a guy they had to cut out of his hard suit.”

Elect to take it as a compliment.

South clicks her tongue. “Looks like the Director finally dropped you down the board. Brutal. Guess just one fuck up will do it.” She rolls her shoulders a little, grinning up at you like she’s sharing wisdom, like she’s one up on you. Basically, like she usually does. “You got knocked the fuck out and I’m already fourth on the board.” She’s preening. You’re grinning before you can stop yourself. “Hey, I see that look. Pay attention, big guy, you’re seventh on the board now. Not gonna give up my spot now, motherfucker. Fight me for it.”

Laugh a little.

“You sounds like a dying woodchipper, you know that?”

Florida breathes smoke toward the ceiling, holds out the cigarette to you. When you don’t accept it, he takes another drag and, in that moment, inspect the scar on his throat, side to side, like a translucent snake smiling across his windpipe and know some time, somewhere, someone tried to slit that line of questioning flesh wide open. South looks up finally.

“Well?” says South. “You want one?”

Shrug.

The left side of South’s mouth pulls up and she sets the iron down a moment to lean toward you, bracing an elbow on her knee. South’s upper arms are corded with muscle and dark with ink. Her left arm is sleeved in a mosaic of flowers and skulls evolving, suddenly, at her shoulder into a network of star systems. Whorls and spiral galaxies cluster in clouds and curlicues up under her ears. Vines of stars coil down under her collarbone and the eagle of the UNSC spreads its wings across her chest, the emblem letters across the top of her breasts, its feathers thick with constellations. The sweep of stars continues down her ribs and sides where a pin-up girl lies down her thigh, head pillowed on her hip, the rainbow nebulas caught in her hair. Vaguely, it’s there: the inclination to touch that color where it lives in her skin.

South sits back and says, “You scared of needles?”

When you don’t respond, just stand there, looking at her, she seems to consider that the end of that topic and, instead, looks you up and down. She grins at you.

“You’d be fun to ink,” she says. She picks up a beer by her boot, finishes it off then tosses it onto her bed. Florida sighs in a way that suggests he wishes she would not drink while she does his color. “Shut up, Florida.” She points at you. “Be a scary motherfucker, maybe remember how to be a badass, Maine. Get your ass up on the top of the board. Come see me where you’re back up there where you fucking should be. Let me know when you do that and I’ll do you.”

Tilt your head very slightly.

“Ha!” South laughs, a jackal-flash of teeth. “Unless you grow porn-star tits in the next ten minutes, that’s not what I meant.” She looks at you, propping her chin in her hand and pursing her lips. “Are you gay?” Florida sighs. “I can’t tell. You don’t fuck anyone.” This is not the first time she’s asked this question in a year you’ve been assigned to this squad, but South repeats herself when drunk. It would bother you less if Florida hadn’t pinned his mouth to yours during a mission. “Florida, you know this shit. Tell me if Maine’s gay.”

“South, first of all,” says Florida, sounding vaguely tired, as though he’s talked about this before, “Agent Maine has been on our team for long enough that I find it somewhat unbelievable that you have not already formed an opinion on this topic. Secondly, do we need to have another talk about appropriate work-place conversation?”

South, in a stage whisper, says, “That means he wants to hump your massive cock, by the way.”

“No, Agent South, it does not. I’ll schedule a sensitivity seminar.”

Clearly not expecting an answer to her question, South turns off the overheads and shines a black-light over Florida’s back. The alien blood burns neon blue – lighting up the skull inside the head. Florida is watching you. You don’t like how he looks at you. There is a tally in black-light ink, on the flat place behind his left ear. The tally is twenty-six and you don’t think the tally is for dead Sangheili.

Florida is still watching you.

“I’m sure you’ll be back on active duty very soon, Agent Maine.” Florida drags another lungful of smoke into his chest. “The Director knows you’re vital to the team. Regardless of your placement on the roster.”

Something about the way he says that bothers you, but as a rule you are ignoring Florida. Go back to your rack as you hear South say, insincerely, “I think he fuckin’ likes you, man.”

When you get back to your room, close the door behind you, then roll into your bunk and dream of stars crawling under your skin, galaxies of dark matter moving over your scars and swallowing them. Then swallowing you, then everything else. Don’t dream of the needle, chattering like teeth in your skull. Dream of the Pelican floor beneath your body, carrying you to the next battlefield.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments and feedback are much appreciated.


End file.
